Last night, Jill and I watched In The Loop, a political satire starring Peter Capaldi. For the record, we enjoyed it, but near the end there was a scene with an error that I couldn't help noticing. When I mentioned it, Jill asked, "Out of all the things is this film, that's what you felt worth commenting on?"
The mistake: In a scene that was intended to in a meeting room at the UN headquarters in New York, there was a mural that purported to be the UN emblem. Except it wasn't. It had the world map in a circle, surrounded by olive branches... but the map was the wrong one. It was a standard Mercator projection, like this:
But, of course, the UN uses a polar projection in its emblem:
The UN deliberately chose that image because it gives precedence to no particular part of the world, and represents the various contents in close proximity to their size, relative to each other.
Now, the studio would have required permission from the UN to use its actual emblem, but the one they used already wasn't the real one: the olive branches were different and other details were not quite right, either. But if they'd used a polar projection map--just not the one the UN specifically uses--they probably would have been OK...and I wouldn't have noticed.
So, my question to you: Would this have caught your eye? What other "mistakes" have caused you to comment when watching a movie or TV show?
1 comment:
I rarely notice discrepancies. I usually just watch, enjoy, move on. One I did notice was in Braveheart. I was just enjoying the movie, assuming it was not entirely accurate - until they got to the scene where William Wallace meet the French princess. No. That ended all enjoyment of the film. I knew he had not met her and I knew her relationship to the English monarchy was not what was portrayed in the film. I later confirmed this by finding the relevant chapters in Costain's history of England. This glaring misrepresentation lead to me reading biographies of anyone whose story I saw in film.
There was something recently (as in during the last year) that I watched with Paul and I kept saying "that's wrong" "now that's wrong" "and that's wrong" but I can't recall what it was.
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