Artistic License Geography / Film

• Played for laughs in Airplane! The male lead, Ted Striker, says he was stationed off the Barbary Coast, but also that the Magumba bar in the (fictional) country of Drambuie was populated with every reject and cutthroat from Bombay to Calcutta. The Barbary Coast is on the Mediterranean coast of Africa, while Bombay and Calcutta are on opposite sides of India. Meanwhile, all the bar patrons are white.
• In All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein's car seems to teleport around Washington, D.C., from shot to shot, at random.
• In An American Werewolf in London, there are no hospitals in Yorkshire. The nearest hospital is apparently 250 kilometres away in London. Might be justified: the dialogue with the doctor after David regains consciousness suggests that he's been transferred to a London hospital because he's suspected of having some rare and exotic disease, which needs highly specialised skills and equipment of the sort that are usually only available in the more densely-populated south of England. The process of getting him to the nearest emergency room for an initial assessment and then down south for further treatment would still have been a significant undertaking however, probably involving a helicopter ride, but none of this is even touched upon in the film.
• The John Ritter film from the '70s Americathon (set in the near future) includes an opening montage/narration to get the audience up to speed about what has happened to America. One included bit of information is that "North Dakota has become the first all-gay state." This is accompanied by a picture of Mount Rushmore, with one of the presidents wearing an earring. Mount Rushmore is in South Dakota. The same film had Great Britain as the fifty-somethingth state of the United States, and Israel united with its Islamic-state neighbors as the "Hebrab" coalition. Who knows if the Mount Rushmore reference was this trope, or just another political-merger joke?
• In Angels & Demons, the entire scene with Cardinal Baggia's near-death assumes the viewer isn't familiar with Piazza Navona. While it is technically possible for a van to drive onto Piazza Navona, it would be way too crowded due to the tourist and cafe nightlife for anyone not to immediately notice. Also, the real Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (AKA Fountain of the Four Rivers) is surrounded by small, spaced concrete pillars designed to protect it from any vehicles getting too close. The real fountain is also smaller and shallower, which would make attempted assassination via drowning very unlikely.
• Army of Darkness is set in a medieval European kingdom that looks exactly like Southern California, deserts and all, and makes absolutely no attempt to hide this. It's probably a quiet joke, and extremely endearing in its own relatively low-budget way.
• Parodied repeatedly in the Austin Powers movies. In the second, Austin and Felicity are driving through "the English countryside." As they pass palm trees, Austin remarks how it "looks nothing like southern California." In the third, special effects were purposely used to put Mount Fuji (located specifically in Yamanashi Prefecture) in the background of every single exterior shot in Japan.
• The So Bad, It's Good 1965 war film Battle of the Bulge combines this with Hollywood History in so many, many ways. Most glaringly, the use of the arid plains of Spain to depict a battle that took place in a Belgian forest in the middle of winter in Real Life. Deep snow and biting cold were notorious among the soldiers participating in the battle. Not to mention the clear and sunny conditions; in real life a heavy fog descended over the forest and all Allied aircraft were grounded during the battle. Really, the film's account of the battle is practically a day at the beach by comparison.
• Bert I. Gordon's giant grasshopper film Beginning of the End is fairly good on Illinois geography, at least on paper. When it comes to filming, who knew Illinois had so many mountains?
• In My Best Friend's Wedding, Cameron Diaz is at her wedding at some large estate with at least a few acres of lawn. She goes running out the front gate... into downtown Chicago.
• Beverly Hills Chihuahua is quite hilarious in its geography for someone who has ever lived in Mexico. The female protagonist and her friends take a weekend trip to Puerto Vallarta from California (which would be a two-day drive if they took a bus), and the titular Chihuahua gets kidnapped and driven to Mexico City, however, some scenes are set in Guadalajara, which is six hours away from Mexico City. Going to all these places would have taken an entire week by car, yet, the film's time frame is set within three days. And, the most egregious example of all, in which both History and Geography fail in one scene, presumably all the Chihuahua dogs in Mexico gather by a Mayan temple in the state of Chihuahua, for a ceremony. The Maya civilization was set on the far South of Mexico and most of Central America, while Chihuahua, which borders on New Mexico and Texas, never housed a particular culture for an extended time. Also, the state is depicted as a jungle-heavy terrain, when it is mostly desert.
• In Wild Orchid a cab driver goes from Galeão Airport to what seems to be some beach in Recreio (a 55 km travel, at longest), but he was considerate enough to take the passenger to visit the Pelourinho, a beautiful landmark ... in Salvador, Bahia! A detour that turns a 55 km trip in a 1,624 km travel! The Pelourinho isn't even located in the same region of Brazil. To a Brazilian, or anyone who has taken one extended vacation on Brazil, it was a blunder comparable to a cab leaving JFK, taking a shortcut in Gateway Arch, in St. Louis, before arriving in the Bronx.
• Bird on a Wire has the main characters taking a ferry from Detroit to Racine, Wisconsin, on a ferry explicitly labeled "DETROIT TO RACINE". That's a trip of approximately 500 miles by water, as one would have to travel around most of Michigan's Lower Peninsula to reach Racine from Detroit. In Real Life, two ferries connect Michigan to Wisconsin across Lake Michigan: the SS Badger, which connects U.S. 10 from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, to Ludington, Michigan, and the Lake Express, connecting Milwaukee to Muskegon, Michigan. The latter (which only opened in 2004) is as close to a Detroit-to-Racine connection as you can get... if you consider that, plus three hours on westbound Interstate 96 and about 45 minutes on southbound SR-32 "close". Racine doesn't even have a dock that can handle a vessel of the size a ferry like that would be likely to be, and that it's a BC Ferry they're riding, from Tsawwassen (Vancouver) to Swartz Bay (Victoria).
• Máramaros, the fictitious place where the 1934 film The Black Cat is set, can not be that far from Viségrad in Hungary, since the police called to protocol an accident arrives from there, yet the real Máramaros ^note Máramaros is the Hungarian name of the Maramureș region, and unlike in the vicinity of Viségrad, Russian troops did fight there in World War I is 350 km to the east in Romania and Ukraine ^note in 2020, in 1934 the Ukrainian part was in Czechoslovakia. Also, one of the officers tells he is from Pistyan, a town in Slovakia ^note in 2020, in Czechoslovakia in 1934 120 km to the northwest. This is probably not due to ignorance, since director Edgar G. Ulmer was born in Austria-Hungary ^note in what is Czechia in 2020. All of the above places were in Austria-Hungary in 1904 when he was born.
• Black Lightning (2009): Kuptsov's Evil Lair is the appropriately-named Diamond Tower of the Federation business complex. There is no such tower in Moscow, nor are there diamond caves below the city.
• The climax of Blade Runner ostensibly takes place in and atop the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles, but during the sequence where Deckard climbs up to the roof, he is obviously climbing up the side of one of the Rosslyn Hotel buildings several blocks away, as evidenced by the blue orbs on the roof line, as well as the increased height of the building itself (the Bradbury having only five floors in real life). Possibly justified in that most of the old buildings in the movie's 2019 L.A. seem to have been given major vertical extensions, and the fact that it is a very cool-looking roof line.
• Blade: Trinity is filmed in Vancouver, and local residents would notice that the characters seem to teleport around the city. The film is not actually supposed to be set in any particular city. The director purposefully included some Esperanto signs and even an Esperanto film (Incubus) to make the city seem somewhat foreign to everyone.
• Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh was actually filmed in Pittsburgh, and several locations are instantly recognizable to residents. However, Pittsburgh does not have an "Egypt District" as seen in the film.
• The Tommy Lee Jones vehicle Blown Away culminates with a car careening, in a straight line, through the Back Bay of Boston while our hero tries to defuse a bomb attached to the dashboard. If you traveled through the Back Bay for that long, that fast in a straight line, you wouldn't need to worry about the bomb, because you'd be underwater.
• Boiler Room: Before the interview, Seth notices the guys at J.T. Marlin (which is actually a criminal operation) look like they're taking the 6 local to Fulton Street. In reality, the 6 doesn't go to Fulton Street as it ends at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall, one stop before. Riders wishing to get off at Fulton Street must take the 4 or 5 expresses along the Lexington Avenue Line.
• Borat deliberately does this, to represent the stereotypical American view of foreign countries. The titular character's country, Kazakhstan, is depicted as a backwards Ruritania built around stereotypes of Eastern European countries as antisemitic, misogynistic, and all-around xenophobic hillbillies. Scenes in Kazakhstan were filmed in Romania. The real Kazakhstan is a Turkic nation of the steppes and bears little relation to the fictionalized version presented in the film, nor to the nations that the film is actually lampooning.
• In The Boy In Blue, the river that stands in for The Thames looks like no UK river at all.
• Amusingly enough, the three main characters in Delta Farce are State Military Reservists sent to Iraq (to the east of the United States) during the Gulf War due to a shortage of manpower, yet they somehow end up in Mexico (directly southwest-ish of the United States). The fact that they were living in the state of Georgia makes it that much more absurd.
• Bruce Almighty features streets on some awfully steep hills in Buffalo, NY. There's no place like it in Buffalo.
• Cannonball Run II is about a cross-country race from the West Coast to the East Coast of the United States. However, the entire movie was filmed in the outskirts of Tucson, AZ—even the finish line, which is said to be in Vermont, but there is a large saguaro cactus visible on the screen.
• The "Europe-Express" in The Cassandra Crossing takes a zig-zag path through Europe that's just outlandish. It's clear that the script of this film was written by Americans who didn't know anything about Europe and just lined up what few European cities they could think of. For example:
  • The train starts in Geneva, which is close to the French border. It could directly head for Paris via Mâcon. So why send it via Basel?
  • A stopover in Paris is next to impossible, or at least very difficult to carry out. All major stations in Paris are dead-ends, and there isn't a single mainline going through Paris; they all end there, each of them in one designated station (for example, trains from Belgium terminate at the Gare du Nord, trains from eastern France and southern Germany terminate at the Gare de l'Est, and trains from Switzerland and southeastern France terminate at the Gare de Lyon). Since the French mainline network is designed mostly in a hub-and-spoke fashion with Paris being the sole hub, sending trains to a different terminal would involve gigantic detours, at least one more change of direction and/or chugging along slowly on non-electrified branch lines behind a diesel. It was even worse in those days without the high-speed network.
  • If a hypothetical train were to travel from Basel via eastern France, Luxembourg and Belgium to Germany (which in reality it wouldn't, see below), it'd leave Brussels out.
  • Long-distance trains in general don't go through Amsterdam either. While it's technically possible, it simply isn't feasible, seeing where Amsterdam lies. Whenever international trains coming from Germany did a stopover in Amsterdam CS, they terminated just a few miles further west at Schiphol airport station or in Hoofddorp, but they would never continue to Brussels. And trains coming from Brussels would always terminate at Amsterdam CS. For passenger rail traffic between Germany and Belgium, the way via Cologne is always the best.
  • Trains from Switzerland to northern Germany or Scandinavia have never taken a route via France and Benelux, and they never would. They'd most likely go directly into Germany, down the Rhine, via Cologne and through the Ruhr Area. Either that or past Frankfurt eastward, up the North-South Line and via Hanover.
  • The writers obviously didn't know anything about the Warsaw Pact either. The train is being re-routed through Czechoslovakia to Poland, both Warsaw Pact countries, with NATO armed forces aboard. The Soviet Red Army has sent troops and tanks into Warsaw Pact countries in reality for probably less than this.
    Even if the train did make it to the Cassandra bridge, it would leave behind traces of a top-secret biological weapon developed by the USA, so secret that hundreds of innocents have to be killed in a cover-up, but then ready to be picked up by the KGB.
  • The train's destination is named Janov and located in southern Poland. If anything, it should be spelled "Janów" then.
• Cloud Atlas: Given that California was admitted to the Union as a free state, it's highly unlikely that a family who works in the slave trade would have put down roots there.
• In Charade, a climactic ride on the Paris Metro is between clearly-labelled stations that are not connected by any single line; so it's important to the plot that Audrey Hepburn never transfers from one train to another.
• In Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Düsseldorf is depicted as a quaint little Alpine town with half-timbered houses and tall mountains in the background instead of the modern industrial city on the Rhine that it actually is, not in plain view of any mountains.^note The movie Düsseldorf is actually Gengenbach, about 320 km south of Düsseldorf. Note also that while "Dorf" means village, at over 600,000 people, Düsseldorf has long outgrown its name.
• The Covenant is particularly bad at this, if you know anything at all about the geography of Essex County, Massachusetts. Spencer Academy supposedly is in Ipswich, which is also the town where the party takes place near the beginning of the film. One of the characters mentions cutting across Marblehead to get away from the cops, which happens to be 20 miles away, down on the other side of Salem. Also, there are absolutely no cliffs along the coasts of Essex County. They are all either sandy or rocky, depending on how sheltered the coastline is, and how close it is to the mouth of the Merrimac River.
• The opening scene of Dad's Army (1971) acts as if Britain can be seen through a pair of binoculars from France, despite the fact the two countries are 21 miles apart and the binoculars of the time wouldn't have been able to see a distance of that length.
• Two otherwise good war movies betray their locations: Dawn Patrol was set in Belgium but obviously filmed in Southern California (like every movie was at the time); Dark Blue World mostly takes place in southern England, but there are some conspicuous Eastern European mountains in the background of many scenes.
• Early in The Deer Hunter, the characters, who ostensibly live in Western Pennsylvania, go deer hunting in a wilderness where there are many bare-topped, snowcapped peaks, betraying the film's California Doubling (the film was shot in Washington).
• Derailed (2002) has a road sign identifying a crossing of the German/Slovakian border. Germany and Slovakia do not have a common border.
• The Devil's Advocate: The movie opens in "Gainesville, Florida". Or rather, a small rural town that looks nothing like the actual, modern, skyscraper-encrusted college town that is the real Gainesville, Florida, but does look like a one-horse hick town in the middle of nowhere, which was probably the point. Apparently the producers wanted Kevin Lomax to be from a small rural town and picked Gainesville, Florida off of a map at random, not realizing that "small rural town" does not describe Gainesville, Florida, and hasn't for about a hundred years. The Civil War-era "courthouse" where the trial was taking place is actually in a one-stoplight town some thirty-two miles east of Gainesville, for example; the courthouses in Gainesville proper are all modern, multistory buildings.
• Similarly, Doctor Zhivago represents the Urals as high, rocky and snowcapped—like Glacier National Park, where the scene was filmed. In actuality they look more like the upper Appalachians, to which they are more comparable in height.
• Dog Soldiers: The rescued damsel comments that the nearest city is Fort William and at least 2-3 hours drive. Unless you're driving very slowly, that's basically impossible. Then again, she was probably lying, because she was one of the werewolves. Alternatively, it's simply a case of Wild Wilderness, using that setting in Western Europe — with, just maybe, the exception of remote parts of the Pyrenees or the Alps — always requires some fantasy.
• The Jean-Claude Van Damme film Double Team shows how Van Damme visits a huge bordello in Antwerp, which cannot be found there in real life. What makes this mistake even more perplexing is that Van Damme is actually a Belgian himself!
• The 1954 movie Drum Beat about the Modoc Indian War, shows beautiful scenery better placed in the southwest. The real Captain Jack's Stronghold was a rocky outcropping of jagged lava flows.
• Elizabeth The Golden Age: There is no cliff in England upon which Elizabeth could have stood to watch the Battle of Gravelines. The English Channel is in the way (there's also the problem that Elizabeth's speech to the troops was not given before the Battle of Gravelines, but some days after; the troops were there to repel a possible invasion by the Duke of Parma, which never materialized). Any film about Elizabeth I that uses the phrase "golden age" non-sarcastically (her regime killed people at four times the rate of the Spanish Inquisition, and with much less fair trials) obviously doesn't care about historical details in the first place.
• In Entrapment, the protagonists head off to Malaysia to carry out a heist in the Petronas Towers at Kuala Lumpur. The movie portrays rural, ramshackle slums with open views onto the fabulous towers themselves. This was done by compositing Kuala Lumpur, which looks like this, with the Malacca river, 122km away. The Malaysian government disapproved.
• In the opening montage of Escanaba in Da Moonlight, Reuben is supposed to be driving north of Escanaba to deer camp. In one scene, however, he can clearly be seen heading south on U.S. Highway 2, which leads back into Escanaba.
• Very often in EuroTrip, and Played for Laughs.
  Cooper: Europe is like the size of the Eastwood Mall. We can walk to Berlin from there [London].
  Cooper, again: Relax, Paris is practically a suburb of Berlin. It's a nothing commute.
• In Fast Five, the main characters are hiding out in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. They take a job hijacking a train that is travelling through a desert scrubland. The job is supposedly within driving distance of Rio, however there is no such desert anywhere in Brazil,^note The most arid regions are in the Northeast Region, really far from Rio much less near Rio, which lies firmly in the tropics.
• Fifty Shades of Grey's poster. Unless Christian's office is located on a SHIELD Helicarrier, the skyline in the movie poster is being shot looking out of a building that physically does not and cannot exist in Seattle.
• The Fourth Kind: Set in Nome, Alaska but fails spectacularly at looking like it in any facet. The establishing shot of the city would seem to indicate that it's nestled in between towering snowcapped mountains and lush evergreen forrests with only a small inlet connecting it to the ocean when in reality Nome is surrounded on one half by the ocean and on the other half by arctic tundra and is thus decidedly flat and barren as a result. This is extra egregious considering how the filmmakers went to extreme lengths to try and sell the movie being based on real events and also incorporating real footage and yet handicapped themselves right out of the gate by neglecting to establish any verisimilitude with the setting of the story.
• Freddy vs. Jason: Springwood is in Ohio. Crystal Lake is in New Jersey. Originally there was supposed to be a sequence to show the teenagers driving all night to show how long it took for them to get between the locations. But the way the film was cut in the final production, it gives the impression that the towns are side by side.
• Sheffield locals would be bemused at the ease that characters in The Full Monty could get a five-minute bus ride covering 30 miles from one side of the city to the other.
• The 2008 Get Smart movie has a long sequence taking place in Los Angeles, in which the characters drive among the core downtown area, the Port of Los Angeles and Van Nuys Airport within the span of about 10 minutes. The thing is, the Port of Los Angeles is actually in San Pedro, some 20 miles away to the south, while Van Nuys Airport is in the San Fernando Valley, not much closer and northwest of downtown. You'd think L.A. would be the one town Hollywood filmmakers could get right. And the tracks where the cars crash for the explosive finale are in Montreal...
• Godzilla (1998):
  • A major plot point about how Godzilla remains hidden despite his size is because he burrows into the New York subways and sewers. But these are only about fifty metres down at their deepest; Godzilla wouldn't be able to tunnel through them without leaving obvious Wormsign and easy detectable seismic disturbances (never mind the fact he definitely couldn't fit into them anyway).
  • During the helicopter chase sequences, Godzilla and the copters are funnelled down labyrinth-like streets of squashed-together skyscrapers that all tower above Godzilla. It should go without saying that Manhattan doesn't remotely resemble that.
  • During the military's second fight with Godzilla, there's an underwater naval battle between the monster and three submarines in the Hudson River. However, the Hudson is only about two-hundred feet in depth at its deepest (with an average depth of only thirty feet); Godzilla could stand on the bottom and his head would be well above the surface. In the film though, Godzilla is shown diving in the Hudson and the riverbed is still nowhere in sight.
  • At the finale, the main characters lead Godzilla from the Park Ave Tunnel to the Brooklyn Bridge after stating its the closest suspension bridge over the East River to their location. It's actually the furthest: Manhattan Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge are both much closer.
• Godzilla (2014):
  • There are plenty of radiation sources in China and Japan far closer to the Philippines than the Kanto region, Yucca Mountain was never operational nor that close to Las Vegas, and all three creatures take the long way from their respective positions to end up in San Francisco. Within the locations however, the geography is quite good — Godzilla takes a reasonable path from Waikiki to the airport, the Female MUTO heads the right way on the Vegas Strip, and so on.
  • Ford's son is evacuated to Oakland Regional Park (which doesn't actually exist, though Redwood Regional Park in Oakland does) by bus. Via the Golden Gate Bridge. Those familiar with the layout of the city know the Golden Gate Bridge leads north while Oakland is in the east. To get there via the Golden Gate Bridge would take far longer. It would make more sense to head east via the Bay Bridge. A possible explanation though is that the city needed to be evacuated at all points due to the sheer amount of traffic trying to evacuate roughly a million people out of the city would create. It would make sense then to have some people evacuated to the north while others are evacuated to the south and directly to the east. It's still a stretch though.
  • The Golden Gate Bridge itself is 220 feet above the water, which is an additional 360 feet deep. Godzilla is 350 feet tall, so standing it wouldn't even break the surface near let alone whack into the middle span, and could easily swim under it.
• In A Good Day to Die Hard, McClane and Jack drive from Moscow to Chernobyl in what looks like a few hours. First of all, the two locations are in different countries, with about 530 miles separating them. And the roads there aren't exactly the well-maintained autobahn. In addition, you have two Americans crossing borders without passports in a stolen car full of weapons, with plenty of police and military checkpoints between them and their destination (which is located in a restricted area, mind you). They also somehow catch up to a helicopter that flew in that direction several hours earlier.
• In The Graffiti Artist, one of the first scenes in the film is supposed to be set in Portland, Oregon and has the main character getting on what is clearly a Seattle Metro bus at what is clearly 3rd and Pine, in the middle of downtown Seattle, as identifiable by the businesses around it and the appearance of the bus shelter. The disregard for the differences in geography between the two cities is in some cases justified because Seattle has better graffiti art (thanks to much more permissive laws), but there is no need for it in this scene.
• The Great Escape. A character gets on his motorcycle near Sagan in Western Silesia, and seemingly within ten minutes, he's on the border of Switzerland. It's actually quite a long distance away.
• The war propaganda film The Green Berets ends with a shot of the sun setting over the ocean. Only it's set in Vietnam, which has no western coastline, meaning the Sun would have to be setting in the east. There's also a suspicious lack of tropical vegetation and abundance of pine trees (it was filmed mainly in western Georgia).
• In Green Zone, the main character, Chief Miller, needs to get to the Republican Palace. He enters the Green Zone through the Assassin's Gate, which is located in the northeast side of the Green Zone. In the next shot, he's traveling East past the crossed swords toward the Monument of the Unknown Soldier, then he ends up at the Republican Palace. The problem is, the Republican Palace is in the southeast corner of the Green Zone and the crossed swords are near the northwestern border. To get to the Republican Palace from the Assassin's Gate through the crossed swords would require driving back and forth or around in circles. All he needed to do was stay on the same road south from the Assassin's Gate and he would have ended up at the palace.
• In The Guardian (1990) the protagonist family lives in Los Angeles, amidst enormous lush green forests.
• Also done in Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet (though it is not like the bard's was good with geography either, see down).
• The opening freeway chase in Hancock is clearly filmed on a short one-mile stretch of the I-105 freeway in El Segundo, California (watch the buildings in the background). After the car is stopped on the I-105/I-405 transition, when Hancock carries it off, downtown Los Angeles is clearly shown in the background, even though it's 25 miles away.
• Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters mostly takes place in Augsburg, a German village with half-timbered houses. In reality, medieval Augsburg was a thriving center of trade with its own bishop and looked more like this.◊
• Highlander has Connor and Duncan MacLeod being born in Glen Finnan, but Glen Finnan is not in fact within the MacLeod clan's lands.
• 2007 film adaptation of Hitman has the main character driving through the "Russian-Turkish border". Russia has no land borders with Turkey. Although one could see where this mistake comes from: the Soviet Union DID share a border with Turkey before its dissolution.
• Home Alone 2: Lost in New York: Shortly after Kevin arrives in New York City, the film presents a montage of his sightseeing adventures that attempts to cram in every interesting location in Manhattan. Kevin is seen taking a picture outside of Radio City Music Hall, which is in midtown Manhattan, and then at the Empire Diner in Chelsea. Next, he is shopping in Chinatown (which is in lower Manhattan), and then looking at the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park, which is all the way on the southernmost part of the island. After that, he heads up to the World Trade Center's observation deck, visits Central Park, and finally arrives at the Plaza Hotel. And Kevin somehow manages to do all of this in just a couple of hours, when it would at least take half a day to do so.
• Hot Shots! Part Deux: Played for laughs, with the American strike team infiltrating a prison compound in the Iraqi jungles.
• In I Am David the titular character escapes from Belene camp (which is shown to be in a mountainous area) simply by running away when the electric fence is shut off. The real Belene camp was on a flat island in the middle of the very wide Danube river and could only be escaped by swimming for the river shore nearly a kilometer away.
• Independence Day:
  • One of the alien saucer ships is parked above downtown Los Angeles, but Randy Quaid can see it from Imperial County? Yeah, okay, they're only 200 miles apart. They also conveniently ignored the existence of the counties of San Diego, Orange, and Riverside, three major and about fifty minor cities, and five mountain ranges in the way. Even if he lived in Palmdale, which is actually in Los Angeles County, he still wouldn't be able to see it.
  • Apparently, the aliens parked over LA, decided to move, got lost, and wound up over San Diego County's Laguna Mountains before they checked their map. The exterior shot of the trailer park shows the eastern slopes of the Laguna Mountains, and the ship appears to be centered above the tiny mountain town of Pine Valley (population 800), which is far, far away from Los Angeles. This really fails when the establishing shot of Will Smith outside his house in LA shows it farther away than the establishing shot of Quaid's trailer park.
  • The "top-secret, not marked on any map" Area 51 is both well-known and clearly marked on any map of central Nevada. Area 51 is Groom Lake Airfield, just one of the many widely-scattered facilities that make up the Nellis Air Force Base complex. You can see it from the perimeter fence, and everybody and their dog knows where it is. The movie shows it in the middle of an enormous salt flat with mountains on the horizon. The real one is indeed right next to a dry lake bed, but it's much smaller and the mountains are much closer. The Area 51 exteriors were shot around Edwards Air Force Base, in the western Mojave Desert of San Bernardino County, California, along with the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
  • MCAS El Toro (which was closed a year after the movie was released) is located in a temperate coastal valley in Orange County, California, surrounded by suburbs, with the relatively-verdant Ortega Mountains to the east. It is not in a remote, arid desert surrounded by rocky hills and sparse scrub brush.
  • On the other side of the world, a British commander sends a message to the Americans, telling them that Israel and Syria have prepared air-strike wings to take out one of the alien spaceships. He says the aircraft are being prepared in the Golan Straits. The straits nearest to the Golan Heights are about four hundred miles south, in the Indian Ocean.
  • A news broadcast mentions that one of the ships has arrived over the capital of India, and is illustrated with a map that shows a ship over Bombay^note it was renamed Mumbai after the film's release instead of New Delhi. (The War of 1996 viral site made for the sequel does imply that both cities were attacked on the same day at the same time, but it still doesn't add up).
  • Of all people, the designers of the War of 1996 viral site did this five times with different locations:
    • One of the errors is that Yokohama was destroyed 6 hours after Tokyo: however, given the supposed radius (20 miles) of the spaceships' weapon, Yokohama is far too close to Tokyo to survive the first wave (the two cities are about 17 miles apart). Nagoya and Osaka are given as third wave and fourth wave targets, respectively; with Yokohama gone, Nagoya would more likely have been a second wave target, while Osaka would not even have survived the third wave. More reasonable fourth (i.e. intercepted) wave targets would have been Kyoto, Okayama, Kitakyushu, Niigata, Sendai or even Fukuoka. Hiroshima would be out of the question here as the ship that destroyed Seoul is supposed to have targeted it.
    • The second error: the segment on the reconstruction of the world shows a destroyed Taj Mahal in Agra, India. Agra is over a hundred miles from New Delhi, and none of the ships in South Asia targeted it.
    • The third error is Denver's supposed destruction. NORAD HQ is nowhere near Denver: it is actually in Colorado Springs, over 50 miles away. The wiki for Independence Day (eventually) got this right.
    • The fourth error: Algiers, Algeria (a third wave city) and Casablanca, Morocco (a fourth wave city targeted by the same ship as Algiers). Casablanca is over 600 miles southwest of Algiers, yet the site has it at least 200 miles to the southeast. Also, the site thinks it's a rural desert location instead of a coastal city home to over 3 million people.
    • The fifth error: There is no city called Pingxiang in Hebei province, China. There is a Pingxiang County in that province, but it is administrated by the government of Xingtai City, instead of being independent (most of the major cities in China are treated the same way as prefectures would be). The confusion must have arisen from that fact. The biggest locale in China by the name 'Pingxiang' is in Jiangxi Province, the closet major city to which is Changsha (in nearby Hunan).
  • A map of Russia in one news report in the movie shows cities in completely wrong places. Also, Moscow is shown to be covered in snow... in July. (And, for an added bit of fun, the map shown is that of the Soviet Union.)
• Indiana Jones
  • The map in Raiders of the Lost Ark shows Jordan and Thailand, which did not exist in 1936 when the film is set. Jordan would have been known as Transjordan, and Thailand would have been known as Siam.
  • The map in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull shows Belize, which would have been British Honduras when the film was set. As for the Mayan civilization, see Mayincatec.
• Innocent Blood confuses Pittsburgh geography. A character demands to know how one gets to the neighborhood called Shadyside, whereupon the action cuts to a very recognizable intersection in another part of town entirely. In another scene, characters drive along the same short stretch of highway about seven times, because that's all the highway there is and the makers wanted a longer car chase. In another instance, a vampire drives out of the Fort Pitt Tunnels and sees the sun rising directly in front of him, between two skyscrapers of the city. The Fort Pitt Tunnels empty out in a northeast direction. There's no way the sun could be coming up in front of him. Note the shadows on the traffic don't reflect the sun directly in front, either. During the latter half of the year, the rising sun would shine directly on the Fort Pitt Tunnel exit at a roughly 2 o'clock angle to the direction of traffic.
• Intersection is one of the few Hollywood movies not only filmed in Vancouver, but actually set there too. As long as they are keeping it real, one wonders why they felt compelled to move the University of British Columbia to the North Shore of Burrard Inlet rather than keeping it in its real location at the edge of the peninsula that forms the city of Vancouver. Perhaps for the very nice views crossing the bridge.
• I Still Know What You Did Last Summer supposedly takes place in the Bahamas, but the hills and rock formations give away that it was filmed in Mexico. There is also a lot of Spanish architecture, also indicative of a Mexican shooting location.
• The final heist in The Italian Job (2003) is a 20-minute long application of this trope. The armored truck starts at Yucca and Vine,^note near the Capitol Records building then appears a mile away and turns twice^note once to the south, then to the west through Hollywood and Highland. It then goes west past Grauman's Chinese Theater, the Mini Coopers drive off, and the van stops in front of the Chinese Theater again before the street collapses. Learning that the subway tunnel is blocked, Steve sends his men to Figureoa and 11th, which is nine miles away in Downtown Los Angeles. Charlie's team then drives 8 miles through the storm drain to the L.A. River,^note east of Downtown L.A. emerges at the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area,^note 20 miles northwest of Downtown L.A. then go past Staples Center^note southwest of Downtown L.A., and now known as Crypto.com Arena. Finally, after Steve loses his helicopter, he chases Charlie to Union Station by going west on Arcadia Street, even though Union Station is immediately behind them.^note a road sign in the background points out the Union Station exit
• In The Jackal, Bruce Willis flees through a DC Metro tunnel from Capitol Heights to Metro Center stations, with Richard Gere in hot pursuit. Those stations are ten stops and a few miles apart. Never mind that the scenes are shot in the Montreal Metro, which looks nothing like the distinctive DC Metro architecture and has rubber tires.
• Jack Reacher takes place in Pittsburgh and was filmed on location. Except Reacher seems to teleport around the city during the same sequences. For example, one car chase involves him speeding through a tunnel for a good 20-30 seconds before slamming into water barrels on the other end and getting out. Any denizen of Pittsburgh will instantly recognize the Armstrong Tunnel, which is only 0.02 miles in length, and the street where the tunnel comes out, Forbes Ave, doesn't have any barrels at the end, since that would prevent traffic along the street. You also wouldn't expect to see a crowd of older people just standing at an intersection there, since it's the location of Duquesne University (true, people could be coming to or from a Penguins game, but no one in that crowd was wearing the team colors). And a key plot point about "the auto part store" makes zero sense, since there isn't one key auto part store that immediately comes to mind to Pittsburghers.
• James Bond:
  • Moonraker has a particularly bad scene where Bond is fleeing down the Amazon River, then comes to Iguazu Falls (a distance comparable to Los Angeles-Chicago; to make matters worse, the Amazon doesn't end in a waterfall, and the Iguazu Falls aren't even in the Amazon watershed), for his meeting with Q, then somehow walks to the enemy base in a Mayan temple in Mexico, which is in a completely different hemisphere.
  • The London boat chase in The World Is Not Enough is full of this.
  • The Rome car chase scene in Spectre is a little strange if you're familiar with the local layout. Note that the cars turn right when they reach the Vatican, right again onto Via dei Corridori, then left onto Via del Mascherino...away from the Tiber. In order to get anywhere near the water, they'd have to immediately circle back towards Castel Sant'Angelo. Even then, the riverside sequence was shot by Ponte Sisto, which is further south.
  • On Her Majesty's Secret Service features Piz Gloria, a peak in the Swiss alps. Seems fair enough so far. However, upon reading some of the signs in the village at the bottom of the mountain, it is implied that it is set in the Bernese Oberland. "Piz" is a Romansh word meaning "Peak", and it is used as a prefix for several mountains in eastern Switzerland, but the Bernese Oberland is not in the area of the country that names their mountains that way.
  • Speaking of Bond movies, a Very Loosely Based on a True Story biopic of Bond author Ian Fleming showed how he was part of a secret WWII mission to recover some important German files located in "Halmstad, Norway". A quick research found the city of Halmstad in neutral Sweden, but this sort of artistic lisence is probably a Bond movie tradition.
• In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the duo steal a monkey from an animal testing lab in Boulder, Colorado and run off with it on foot. The next scene they are out in the wilderness, and the scene after that they are in a diner in Utah. Boulder to Utah would be a 300+ mile hike, over the Rocky Mountains, and would take weeks even for seasoned backpackers.
• In Joy Ride the boys drive through Wyoming, stopping to sleep at a hotel in Rawlins. When the sheriff shows up the next day to investigate a murder, his car identifies him as the Rawlins County sheriff. Problem is, there isn't a Rawlins County in Wyoming. There is a Carbon County, where Rawlins is.
• Jurassic Park:
  • Jurassic Park has a scene that takes place at an oceanfront restaurant in San José, Costa Rica, but San José is inland. The subtitles establishing this had to be redubbed for the film's Caribbean release, but remain uncorrected elsewhere. It also ends with the helicopters flying off from Isla Nublar towards the setting sun — due west out over the Pacific Ocean, where there's no land for thousands of miles...
  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park: For the cargo ship to aimlessly drift into the Port of San Diego from the Pacific Ocean, it must have somehow swerved around the Coronado peninsula by itself, which divides the San Diego Bay from the ocean. When the Tyrannosaurus is seen roaring in front of downtown San Diego it's suddenly on the other side of the bay to boot.
  • Jurassic Park III: The juxtaposition scene has the Spinosaurus attacking Grant & co. during nighttime, and Ellie's son being distracted by Barney during the afternoon. Costa Rica is in the same timezone as Central Standard Time, so there's no place in America where such a huge time difference would happen.
• Kac Wawa: In what is just one of the screenplay's issues, one character goes through downtown Warsaw on a walk between two locations on the western bank of the Vistula. However, for some reason he is shown crossing the river, which in real life would just make the trip unnecessarily long.
• One gets the impression that the American scriptwriters of Kangaroo Jack never so much as glanced at a map of Australia.
  • Frankie tells Charlie and Louis to fly to Sydney, and from there drive due north to Coober Pedy. In reality, Coober Pedy is west-northwest from Sydney (and a 2000-km^note 1250 mi drive, in case anyone's interested).
  • And then they somehow end up in Alice Springs, nearly 700 km^note about 440 mi north of Coober Pedy.
• Kingdom of Heaven - apparently Jerusalem is right in the middle of a flat desert rather than built on green hills.
• In Kingpin, they are driving to Reno from the Midwest; however, the film has them arriving on I-80 from the west. This was likely a deliberate choice by the director as this view of the Reno skyline is from the top of a hill, and is better visually than the correct eastern approach.
• In Knight and Day, Tom Cruise's character seems to hop around different places in Salzburg during his stay there. This is especially apparent in the roof chase sequence, where he starts off in Altstadt centre on the roof of the Residenz^*(with several faculty buildings of Salzburg University seemingly standing in as his hotel building) to the south of the river Salzach, and ends up on the northern bank near the foot of the Kapuzinerberg mountain before falling off and plunging into the aforementioned river (and not smashing head-first into the two-lane street, promenade and gravel bank that are actually there).
• Krakatoa East Of Java managed to get this in the title: Krakatoa is actually west of Java. Reportedly, they actually knew this, but decided that East sounded more exotic.^note Well, it's east of Java if you go east for long enough, by which we mean across the entire globe back to Krakatoa itself.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen features a car chase in Venice, which has no roads. A car chase in Venice is like having a yacht race in the Atacama Desert (Roger Ebert made fun of this faux pas when he reviewed the movie on TV). Venice's canals are apparently also deep enough to accommodate a battlecruiser-sized submarine, and have bridges over them on the sixth floor of the buildings lining the canals, under which said submarine's fuselage (never mind the turret) can fit. There are also cemeteries with below-ground plots—in a city at sea level.
  • In addition, the climax takes place in Mongolia. The heroes and villains both supposedly reach Mongolia by sea, even though the country is landlocked with no rivers that go anywhere near the Pacific Ocean.
• The 2010 Amy Adams film Leap Year is all over the place regarding Irish geography. The heroine's plane, traveling from Boston to Dublin, is forced to land in Cardiff, Wales due to terrible weather. She ends up hiring a boat to go to Cork for some reason; now even if we are to assume the storm blocks off Dublin Port, there are plenty of harbours closer to the city than Cork, which is on the southern coast of Ireland. Not that it matters, since bad weather forces the boat to put ashore in Dingle... which is not only west of Cork but right on the west coast of the country, and yet further away from Cardiff. Further, as in about adding about a third again onto her trip.
• Left Behind:
  • A shot labeled "Israeli-Syrian Border" and shows tanks driving over desert. The border of Israel and Syria, which is called the Golan Heights, is actually green and mountainous (and is a subject of dispute partially for this very reason).
  • The film opens with a shot of Jerusalem, with the morning sun glinting off the eastern face of the Dome of the Rock, and the subtitle, "Jerusalem, 6:00 p.m." A moment later we see the title "Iraq, 6:03 p.m.", as Iraqi fighter planes stream west into the setting sun; and then, "Syrian-Israeli border, 6:03 p.m.", and flocks of helicopters and tanks with their shadows stretching out in front of them — except that Syria is east of Israel, so these helicopters and tanks appear to be invading Syria from Israel (Clark gave up after the next shot, "Mediterranean Sea 6:04 p.m.", which showed fighter planes with the sun directly overhead).
  • Also, Iraq is an hour ahead of the other two countries. At the time the film was released, Iraq was still using DST (which was abolished in 2007). Whether it was summer or winter, it would've always been an hour ahead of Israel and Syria (both use DST to this very day).
• In Life-Size, Casey Stuart tries to convince her father that Eve is a plastic doll come to life. Part of her argument is that Eve says she's from Sunnyvale, which is an obviously fake place that does not exist. Except that... yes, Sunnyvale is a very real location in California.
• Real-life Texas does not have the rugged, pine-forested mountains seen in the climax of The Lone Ranger.^note The state does have rugged mountains and pine forest, but the former are located in the far west of the state with the latter hundreds of miles away in east Texas. Also, Promontory Point (where the transcontinental railroad was completed) is in Utah.
• One scene in Looney Tunes: Back in Action has Brendan Fraser chasing a villain leaving the Louvre... and somehow immediately reaching the Eiffel Tower like two seconds later. In real life, they're about 4 km apart.
• The Animated Credits Opening in Mannequin in which the Egyptian princess travels the world while being whisked through history and, among other things, proves to Columbus that the world is round. She briefly visited the future before backtracking. All in line with the Rule of Funny.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • The Avengers (2012) first uses Cleveland, Ohio as Stuttgart, Germany. The aerial view looks as if the city was on a plain, while the real Stuttgart is as hilly as San Francisco. Stuttgart's main shopping street is indeed called Königsstrasse, but no building there is more than six stories high and Königsstrasse 22 opens onto a street. Also, the city does not have elevated railways.
  • Later in the movie, parts of the Chitauri invasion in The Avengers (2012) use Cleveland as New York City. One can tell this because the traffic lights don't look like New York City traffic lights.
  • Cleveland also doubles for Washington DC in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, most noticeable as Nick Fury is involved in a lengthy car chase, that actually begins and ends on adjacent streets which form the southeast corner of the Cleveland Public Library.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron: The theatrical version does leave one with the impression that Johannesburg, a landlocked city in South Africa, is located pretty close to the coast instead of hundreds of miles inland as it feels like the deranged Hulk managed to get there within minutes.
  • Avengers: Endgame: The scenes from New Asgard were filmed in a tiny, hilly Scottish village, but we are told it's actually the town formerly known as Tønsberg, Norway. The real Tønsberg is much bigger, with a population of 40 000, and is situated in the Norwegian lowlands.
  • Black Widow (2021): Natasha goes after her 'mother' who now lives in a pig farm in St. Petersburg. Along with that being Russia's second biggest city instead of some rural town, St. Petersburg is usually too cold to do such rural activities.
• In Joe Dante's film Matinee the action takes place in Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in the final shot there's a great view of the Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad in the background — 400 miles to the north and 20 years into the future.
• In Mean Girls the students go to "Old Orchard" mall, a well known mall in suburban Chicago. The mall shown in the movie is indoors (the scene was filmed at Sherway Gardens in Toronto), whereas Old Orchard is an outdoor mall.
• The Mighty Ducks movies are set in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota and frequently feature local geography. Which would be great if it didn't feature 13-year olds rollerblading to locations that are up to 60 miles away from each other in Real Life (and don't allow rollerblading in the first place).
• In Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), at the start of the film, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's characters claim that they met in Bogotá, Colombia. In a flashback to said moment, they show Bogotá, a real-life city of nearly 7 million (at the time of filming) with a cool climate, portrayed as a small river-side town where the sun always shines, people listen to flamenco music and there's no need for clothes. To make things worse, a soldier speaks with a heavy Mexican accent. Even the actors said that they've never been to Bogotá, or Colombia, for that matter. Colombians were so not happy.
• In Mr. Bean's Holiday, Mr Bean accidentally takes a taxi in Paris from the Gare du Nord (in the North-East corner of the city) to the business district of La Défense (west of Paris). The taxi passes the Eiffel Tower (which is not even on the way) and then Notre-Dame de Paris (which lies to the East of the Eiffel Tower). Also, if the previous example could be explained, there is no way the Millau Viaduct is remotely on the way between Avignon (the station where Mr Bean was filmed escaping the police) and Cannes. But then, there is no way either a road trip in France can take more than ~10 hours, and that's if the motorways are really clogged. And if you cross the whole country. This film has some screwed up geography. Maybe the cabbie was taking an extra screwy route to collect a better fare?
• Jackie Chan's Mr. Nice Guy features a chase sequence through central Melbourne, Australia, that features about two dozen sharp turns, two or three of which actually do exist in real life.
• So apparently there are thick rainforests and Mayan ziggurats just south of the Rio Grande, since the main characters of Monsters stand atop a ziggurat while looking at the American border wall.
• The Mummy Trilogy:
  • The opening of the first film features lovely CGI-crafted establishing shots of the Ancient Egyptian city of Thebes in 1290 BC, complete with smooth pyramids resembling those of the Giza necropolis in the background. What's wrong with this? Well, the Giza necropolis is located in...Giza, which is in Lower Egypt and far, far away from Thebes, a city located deep in Upper Egypt. In fact, all of the famous pyramids are in Lower Egypt, as they were mostly built during the Old Kingdom period, when the capital was in Memphis, and the latter part of the Middle Kingdom period, when it was in Itjtawy, 40 km south of Memphis. Upper Egypt does have a couple of pyramids, but they are all located away from Thebes (the closest is the Pyramid of Naqada, situated a good 37 km north along the Nile) and either small step pyramids or cenotaphs, not humongous Giza-style smooth pyramids. Finally, even if Thebes did have pyramids, they wouldn't have been built smack-dab in the city center, seeing as they were tombs, and should have been west of the Nile because the Egyptians believed that dead souls entered the underworld with the help of the setting sun.
  • The Establishing Shot of London in The Mummy Returns shows St Paul's Cathedral, Tower Bridge and Big Ben all in the same shot. Apparently, the scenes are set inside the Thames Television logo◊. The creators actually did film in London and knew where things were, but went for Rule of Cool.
• In the original The Naked Gun movie, Leslie Nielsen is picked up from LAX and taken to the Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters (presumably in Los Angeles). On the way, they pass the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, which is in San Diego County, just past the Orange County line but easily 75 miles from LAX. As this was a comedy and the power plant looks like two giant breasts (pointed out in this scene as a reference to one character's ex-girlfriend), the writers surely knew this. This is likely a reference to the short-lived TV show Police Squad! (which Naked Gun was based on). Even though the show took place in New York, you would frequently have backgrounds that clearly did not belong to New York City (i.e. when they are driving through "Little Italy" the background depicts the Roman Colosseum). The movie starts off with an LAPD detective running an undercover operation in the Middle East, so accuracy went right out the window from the word go.
• In the first National Treasure, there is a chase scene on foot in Philadelphia. Everything is fine until the characters run the wrong way to get where they wind up.
• Niagara: Relatively minor. Not only did the "Rainbow Cabins" motel never exist, but there's no courthouse in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Or a "City Morgue". Then or now! When the movie was made, Niagara Falls was in Welland County, with the historic Welland Country Courthouse being in Welland, Ontario. Welland County was amalgamated with neighboring Lincoln County in 1970; however criminal cases in "Niagara South" are typically still tried at the Welland County Courthouse. As for the morgue, the body would have been sent to the local Greater Niagara General Hospital.
• In North By Northwest, Roger O. Thornhill is seen driving on a treacherous, winding coastal road along cliffs several hundred feet high in Long Island, New York. While there are some small cliffs in parts of Long Island, there is no scenery or road there anywhere approaching the type of landscape Grant was driving in, which was clearly modeled after the California coast.
• No Way Out (1987) is legendary for its mashing of Washington, D.C., area geography.
• The Madrid airport shown on screen in Operatio Fortune Ruse De Guerre resembles more a regional airport than the real deal.
• In Orange County, Shaun goes to Orange County High School. There is no Orange County High School in California, though Orange County School of the Arts, in Santa Ana, was known as Orange County High School of the Arts until 2012. There is an actual Orange County High School in Virginia.
  • Shaun's brother tells him he can get him to Stanford University, located in Palo Alto, in three hours. He must really floor it, because driving from So Cal to the Bay Area usually takes twice that long.
• In Oxford Blues the sculling race on the Isis (the Thames in Oxford) is all over the place, if you're familiar with that stretch of river. They even randomly skip to Pangbourne (about 30 miles away by river). The funny thing is that it appears they had enough footage of the right stretch that they could have put the clips together in a realistic order if they'd been bothered.
• In Paycheck (set in Seattle, Washington), John Wolfe shouts their location as 6th Avenue and Pine Street, which in real life is smack-dab in the middle of Downtown and has a number of buildings surrounding it.
• In action in Pathfinder which takes place between Vikings and natives in the new world. This means either the rocky coastal meadows of Newfoundland or the rocky coastal forests of Maine. Instead, it appears to be a Pacific Northwest-ish rainforest tucked away in the Alps, if not the Andes.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Singapore is depicted as a valley full of hills and high rock formations, which does not describe the country at all (mind you, there are hills in Singapore; they are just not tall and numerous enough to justify what are shown in the film). At times, it looks suspiciously more like Hong Kong.
• The Earth All Along twist ending of Planet of the Apes (1968) makes those arid and mountainous landscapes out of the American Southwest turn out to be the American Northeast, which is anything but (and even a nuclear winter wouldn't change that much).
• In the Disney Channel Movie Princess Protection Program, the swamp in Louisiana is shown to be very mountainous. The only problem? The highest point in Louisiana is only 535 feet (163 m) high, and is nowhere near the swamps. Worse yet: the description on the DVD cover (or at least the one on the Redbox vendor screen) states the movie takes place in Wisconsin, which is four states away.
• Cheapo '50s proto-technothriller Radar Secret Service is set in Washington D.C., but looks suspiciously like Southern California. Also, there's apparently a canyon near Washington.
• Reign of Fire: The Americans came to Britain by plane and landed near Manchester with plans to head to London, which is southeast of Manchester. And yet somehow they ended up in the protagonist's hideout in Northumberland, which is north of Manchester.
• Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves:
  • When Robin arrives in Dover he heads off to his father's castle in Nottingham and says they'll be there by nightfall. Which is extremely unlikely given they're more than 200 miles apart, and he isn't driving.
  • And as one reviewer asked, "if Robin Hood lands at Dover and is walking to Nottingham, then why does he go via Hadrian’s Wall?", which is located in the North of England and is over shooting Nottingham by an extra 180 miles, but is somehow within five miles of Locksley Manor in the movie. Given the movie's writers were both born in Britain, you'd think they knew better — though perhaps the locations were chosen without regard for the script.
  • He also over shoots Nottingham on the way back from his detour to Hadrian's Wall by over 200 miles to the south since Locksley Manor is in fact Old Wardour Castle in Wiltshire. They must have walked fast back in 12th Century if he managed to cover over 800 miles in one day.
  • The distinctive waterfall Robin washes under at one point is a well known tourist attraction called Hardraw Force in the Yorkshire Dales, which is around 150 miles north of Nottingham and Sherwood Forest, while the river where Robin first meets Little John and the Merry men is Aysgrath Falls in North Yorkshire, which is over a 100 miles north of Sherwood Forest.
• Tommy Wiseau spliced in a slew of establishing shots of San Francisco in The Room (2003), but the movie was filmed in LA. In addition to a very improbable scene of the lead character returning home from work on a cable car line that obviously could not exist, the rooftop scene is done using a "green screen". As the apartment building appears in the film, backgrounded by a postcard skyline view, the apartment building would have to be built out in the middle of the bay, or maybe on Alcatraz. It would look ridiculous to any San Francisco resident.
• Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx features shots of the lovely snow capped mountains for which the Bronx is known far and wide. Oh, wait... Also, many shots feature highly distinctive Vancouver landmarks in the background. And sometimes the foreground.
• Lola of Run Lola Run needs to get to her boyfriend in 20 minutes by running across Berlin — or, judging by the route she takes, schizophrenically teleporting....
• Rush Hour (1998) has a minor example: when the two visit the Chinese Theater in Hollywood, Lee ditches Carter by jumping on a tour bus going west on Hollywood Blvd. It then turns right on Orange Drive, then magically appears going northbound at Hollywood and Vine, a quarter-mile to the east.
• In Savages, at one point the protagonists are instructed to drive from Los Angeles to Chula Vista, a city south of San Diego. Besides the fact that the streets looking nothing like the actual city, not even the highway sign for the distance driven is accurate.
• A Scanner Darkly gets a lot right about its Orange County, California, setting, to the point that the filmmakers have Shown Their Work. However, there are a few nits. For example, when the main characters are in a car on Interstate 5 traveling south from Anaheim to San Diego, they break down at Culver Avenue in Irvine. The views outside their car show the proper landmarks for these locations. When they take a tow truck back home, they're traveling north, and we see them pass proper landmarks around the Marketplace shopping center and office park in Irvine and Tustin. However, people familiar with this stretch of highway will notice that they pass the same locations several times.
• Scary Movie 4 shows the characters watching news footage of the city of Detroit before and after the aliens attack (the joke being that Detroit was already so bad that the aliens didn't have any effect on it whatsoever). But the city in the footage is actually San Diego.
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty:
  • You can't get to Afghanistan through Yeman by bus as shown. The only land route would have taken Walter into Saudi Arabia Iraq and then Iran.
  • As of right now, you can't fly directly from New York City to Nuuk, Greenland as shown. The only flights that go to Greenland are from Iceland and Denmark, so it is plausible to fly directly from New York City to Copenhagen then to Nuuk.
  • Stykkishólmur is not right next to Eyjafjallajökull. The map shown is of the Westfjords, north of Stykkishólmur, with both the town and Eyjafjallajökull edited in.
• The obscure American 1940 movie Ski Patrol follows a group of Finnish soldiers in the 1939 Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. The movie depicts the countries' border as a Middle European mountain range◊ — for reference, even the highest points of the countries' border don't rise above half a kilometre in height. Reportedly, the first panorama of this sight made the Finnish audience burst into laughter.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), when Sonic and Robotnik arrive in Egypt near the Giza pyramids, there's nothing but desert visible in all directions. The pyramids and the Sphinx are actually surrounded by roads, numerous other monuments, and city on three sides. In fact, there's a KFC/Pizza Hut combination restaurant less than 1000 feet from the Sphinx itself.
• Son of the Mask This movie is set ten years after The Mask and in Fringe City, which is 270 miles southwest of Edge City. Stanley Ipkiss tossed the Mask into the ocean at the end of the first movie, and at the start of the second, it's floating in a river toward Fringe City. So, not only did the Mask travel the wrong way up the river, it appears to be moving at about five miles an hour. In ten years it would have moved about 17,520 miles away from the coast. It's even more baffling because the first film ends with both his best friend and his dog jumping into the river to retrieve the Mask.
• The Sound of Music: Even if you did "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" from Salzburg, Austria you would not end up in Switzerland. So where would you end up? Germany! Specifically, Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had his Alpine retreat. Furthermore, the actual Austrian-Swiss border is not mountainous at all, and actually lies along part of the Rhine. The real Von Trapps simply took a train to Italy for "vacation" and never came back; Georg had been born in a part of Austria-Hungary that was ceded to Italy after World War I, so he and his family could claim Italian citizenship.
• In Speed, the freeway depicted as I-10 at the start of Annie's ride is actually I-105, which was already completed during filming. The I-105 jump sequence was filmed on the I-110/I-105 interchange (specifically, the southbound 110 offramp to the westbound 105), which actually was unfinished at the time.
  • The bus exits the east I-10 freeway onto Western (south) using a cloverleaf ramp that doesn't exist in Real Life, then goes from there to the I-105 in El Segundo (around 18 miles away) in under a minute.
• Spider-Man 2: Spider-Man and Doc Ock's fight on board an elevated train takes place on what is clearly a Chicago L train dressed up to look like a New York Subway train, given that there have been no elevated lines in Manhattan below 125th Street since the 1950s saw the dismantling of the Second and Third Avenue els. To their credit, they do their best to hide the fact they're in Chicago, such as dressing up the train in appropriate signage, but even so, you can see the station signs for Clark / Lake station as Spider-Man and Dock Ock are gaining their footing on the train roof.
  • On top of that, the elevated train is designated as an R train, which runs underground along its entire route.
  • Not all of the fight was filmed in Chicago, though, as the scene where Spider-Man is thrown from the train, and is briefly dragged along the street was filmed under the Harlem Valley viaduct on the IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue Line, one of the only two above-ground segments of track within Manhattan.
• Star Trek: First Contact shows the southeastern Pacific from orbit at one point. Australia is clearly visible, but New Zealand for some reason is completely missing (or at the very least offscreen).
• In Stuart Little, the cats lay an ambush in Central Park for the returning Stuart, whose homeward route they know will take him through the park. This makes not much sense considering the layout of Manhattan and the bridges leading to it, one of which Stuart is shown crossing.
• Taking Lives, somewhat unusually, rather than having Montreal stand in for some random American city, set the action in Montreal. Which they indicated with a big establishing shot of the Château Frontenac, the most famous landmark in... Quebec City (it's a little like establishing a scene in L.A. using a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge).
• Parodied in Team America: World Police, where Team America's operations regularly destroy historical landmarks that are nowhere near each other (for example, the Pyramids and the statues of Ramses).^note A statue was later moved to the Giza Plateau, not far from the Pyramids, but at the time the film was made, the move was still in the planning stages and that statue remained in central Cairo, about 20 kilometers away. Also, the statues depicted were at Abu Simbel, which is at the other end of the country, over a thousand kilometers away.
• A less extreme example is 10 Things I Hate About You. Only someone familiar with Seattle would realize the featured high school is actually in Tacoma, and that realistically it would take much more time to travel from the Fremont Troll to the U-District. The only real misrepresentation is somewhat incidental, and that's the climate. Seattle never gets that much sun during an actual school year.
• In 10,000 BC the protagonist lives in a massive Ice Age mountain range, filled with tundra, glaciers, and mammoths. He then treks down from those mountains, almost immediately entering a verdant jungle with a transitional climate about ten yards across. On exiting said jungle and crossing another ten yard transition, he's in an arid desert. Film Brain from Bad Movie Beatdown has a lot to say about the absurd geography in this film.
• Titanic: Jack mentions going ice fishing on Lake Wissota in Wisconsin with his father. Except Jack dies in 1912, and Lake Wissota is an artificial reservoir that wasn't filled until about 5 years later. Some fans speculate that Rose is an Unreliable Narrator and could've simply messed up her facts.
• In the 2010 film The Tourist, Frank Tupelo walks out of the Santa Lucia train station in Venice, and is immediately invited aboard Elise's boat. The shot then pans out as the boat speeds off, showing them to be moving north on the grand canal from Piazza San Marco, actually heading towards Santa Lucia from the opposite end of the island.
• The scene in Trainspotting where Diane and Rents come out of the nightclub? Filmed outside the Volcano, in Glasgow. The characters are based in Edinburgh, which is fifty miles away. The taxi fare must have been ruinous.
• The Transformers Film Series franchise makes several errors.
  • Transformers (2007) has the characters go from the Hoover Dam in Nevada to what appears to be Los Angeles, California in a short space of time, when in actuality they're about a four and a half hour drive from each other. The film handwaves this by referring to it vaguely as Mission City, only for the sequel to then refer to it as LA without explanation.
  • Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen acts as though Giza, Aqaba, Petra, and Luxor and their associated landmarks are within an hour or less of each other. Its depiction of Petra suggests that there are driveable roads leading up to Ad-Deir. In actuality, any visitor to Petra has to hike up a long trail (with regular steps) to get to it, unless you want to pay the Bedouins the exorbitant fee they charge to ride a camel or donkey up. The filmmakers also assiduously avoid showing you the rather large snack bar/gift shop complex that's right next to it. Also, the orangy-red desert that is represented as being in Egypt is recognizably Wadi Rum, in southern Jordan very close to the Saudi Arabian border.
  • The whole scene where we are introduced to Jetfire in Revenge of the Fallen is confusing. The opening shot is of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, located in downtown Washington, D.C. (never mind that the Space Shuttle and Blackbird are located in the Udvar-Hazy Museum, located just off of the Dulles Airport, some 40 miles away!). When Jetfire leaves the hangar/museum, Jetfire and the others find themselves walking around in a rural desert-like area. What happened to downtown DC?????
  • Among its other inconsistencies with its depiction of Hong Kong, apparently Transformers: Age of Extinction thinks that there's a suspension bridge connecting Hong Kong Island with Kowloon, when in fact the island is exclusively connected by either ferry or three cross-harbor tunnels. The bridge depicted is actually the Stonecutters Bridge crossing over the Kowloon Container Terminal (something that another movie about giant robots fighting in Hong Kong managed to get right, even though that film didn't have any actual street scenes shot on location). Also, the sprawling landscape of Wulong Karst National Park is on Hong Kong Island for some reason, even though it would've probably taken up a quarter of the whole island. To top it off, you can briefly see the Willis Tower 311 South Wacker Drive (both located in Chicago) in a background shot, giving away some California Doubling.
    • The characters are also shown driving from Beijing to Hong Kong in only a few hours, despite the fact the two locations are roughly thirteen-hundred miles away; you'd be travelling across nearly the length of the entire country.
  • A scene in Transformers: The Last Knight shows Stonehenge as being isolated. A quick look at Google Maps shows the A303 within 200 metres from the monument. It also shows a character running down an alley in Oxford to get to a library, which is actually in the opposite direction, and also shows a library in London that is actually in Trinity College, Dublin.
• Troy expects us to believe that Mycenae was located on a sea coast, when, in fact, the real city was about 12 miles inland.
• In the movie version of Twilight, the scenes supposedly taking place in Arizona are completely inaccurate. It is clear in the book that Bella's house is in Paradise Valley, a highly populated suburb of Phoenix known for its large houses and for being a valley. However, her house in the movie is clearly not in Paradise Valley, especially because it is on a mountain. Also, the scene when the Cullens and Bella are playing baseball there is a view of a tall waterfall. That falls is called Multnomah Falls on the Columbia Gorge. Furthermore, while Forks is 30 miles south of the Canadian border, Multnomah Falls is in Oregon. However, this might simply be Oregon Doubling, since Oregon is cheaper to film in than Washington, and filmmakers figured most viewers wouldn't know the difference.
• What's Up, Doc? was filmed on location in San Francisco, but a number of locations were intentionally changed into fictitious settings. The Hotel Bristol that much of the film takes place in was actually the Hilton. As for two locations specified by address in the third act, Mr. Larrabee's home at "888 Russian Hill" was actually 2018 California Street, while the jewel thieves' hideout at "459 Dirella Street" was actually Historic Pier 70 located around 22nd Street.
• Minor example in the opening sequence of When Harry Met Sally..., when the two characters are driving away from the campus of the University of Chicago. The car makes a turn, then there's a cut, and the car is in a completely different part of the campus, in a place they couldn't possibly have driven to.
• In The X-Files: Fight the Future movie, the government sets up its alien research camp in the desert just outside of Dallas, TX where the creature was found. Dallas and the North Texas area are located on the southern extension of the Great Plains, with the closest desert region at least 200 miles west of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Even worse, you wouldn't be able to see the Downtown Dallas skyline from that angle and distance. Too many hills and forests block the view. And let's not get started on those accents...
  • Not to mention all those mountains seen in the movie behind the Dallas skyline. Granted, Central Texas is known as the Hill Country, but that area starts approximately 100 miles south of Dallas - and there is a difference between hills and mountains...
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men: There is no Laughlin City within the province of Alberta.
  • X-Men: First Class: There's a scene where Erik kills some bad guys that supposedly takes place in the Argentinian city of Villa Gesell. The establishing shot shows snowy mountains and a beautiful lake surrounded by hills; the only problem is, although you can find a lot of cities that look like that in the southern part of the country, the real Villa Gesell is a beach city located nowhere near that area. The shot resembles the Argentinian city of Villa La Angostura where, according to legend, some Nazis hid away after World War II with the help of President Perón. So the mistake wasn't that big, but it was extremely hilarious for the Argentinian and German publics.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: The Pentagon is definitely not in Washington, DC. It's across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia. It's understandable because it has a Washington, DC mailing address, and Arlington was once part of DC.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: Stryker manages to go from the X-Mansion (Northern New York, Eastern USA) to Alkali Lake (stated in the first two movies to be in Alberta, Western Canada) in a helicopter, without refuelling.
• In the German film Zugvögel — Einmal nach Inari, there are a few shots from inside a train that's supposed to approach the German island of Fehmarn via the Fehmarnsund Bridge on its way to Scandinavia. However, those familiar with the island can easily tell that the shots were taken from a southbound train that left the island. It was shot on location at least, but still.
• Zeitgeist posits that the supposed North American Union, African Union, European Union, and "soon-to-be" Asian Union will be merged as the final step in a grand conspiracy to form a one-world government. So what happens to South America, then?

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