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Movies and television shows are full of blunders, some more noticeable than others, and each with their specific guild of victims. Ornithologists fume when British period dramas are overdubbed with American birdsongs. Government employees will tell you that the supposed main White House staffer in Contact has a nonexistent job. Archeologists hate movie shipwrecks, and marine biologists are already mad about the zombie sharks in the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean installment, which, as cartilaginous fishes, should not have ribs—even ghostly ones.
But these are merely occasional grievances. There's one group of experts who can barely flip on the television without being exposed to egregious, head-on-desk mistakes: chess players.
"There are a ton of chess mistakes in TV and in film," says Mike Klein, a writer and videographer for Chess.com. While different experts cite different error ratios, from "20 percent" to "much more often than not," all agree: Hollywood is terrible at chess, even though they really don't have to be. "There are so many [errors], it's hard to keep track," says Grandmaster Ilja Zaragatski, of chess24. "And there are constantly [new ones] coming out."
[...] Peter Doggers of Chess.com notes another Dramatic Checkmate move: the felled king. "Tipping over your king as a way of resigning the game is only done in movies," he says. (See Mr. Holland's Opus, in which Jay Thomas slaps his king down after being owned by Richard Dreyfuss).A normal chess player will just go in for a good-game-style handshake. "This falling king thing has somehow become a strong image in cinematography," he says, "But chess players always think: 'Oh no, there we go again...'"
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 23 2017, @04:37PM
Gunsmiths cringe when the hero fires hundreds of rounds from a single charger, operates a Minigun one-handed or when baddies fly 20 feet backward when hit by bullets.
Car designers cringe when all cars invariable explode 2 minutes after an accident.
I don't have to be a gunsmith to understand the basics of bullet physics (a tiny object does not have enough energy to pick up a human body and propel it 20 feet), or to know that cars don't explode routinely. The car thing is really bad, because most people (in the US at least) own and drive cars every day, so you'd think we'd know a few things about them. And plenty of us have been in accidents, or known people who were, or have seen accidents in traffic, and would know that it's not at all common for cars to explode after one.
Most people use computers these days too, and should know perfectly well that computers do not make beep-beep sounds when typing, and don't have huge PASSWORD screens or talk to people.
In summary, there's no reason to assume that non-experts wouldn't be able to spot all these things.
As for 2001, that's a movie set in space, and was filmed before humans had even reached the Moon. Cars having accidents isn't something remarkable that almost no one has experience with; everyone drives or rides in cars, and making a car explode costs a lot of money on-set, whereas having a car not explode costs much less. Having a computer act like a normal computer costs almost nothing; making it make stupid beep-beep noises and have a huge PASSWORD screen costs extra money.