> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. Cinema is worse off when over-aggressive restorations alter the action within the frame. To me, this is equivalent to swapping out an actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music score during an action sequence, or replacing a puppet creature with a computer graphics version of the same creature decades after release.
It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just mistakes.
Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it more modern-day.
I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd noticed and gone for another take. They take us out of the movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us in the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.
I'm sure most people know the story. In the Twin Peaks pilot, a mirror reflection of a set dresser was briefly caught by the camera. Instead of editing this out of reshooting, David Lynch gave him a role in the show.
Anyway, movies can have revisions. A movie is as much a commercial product as it is art. I don't see why people need to get all righteous about it, especially in cases where directors, actors, etc., don't care.
Novels get revisions. Even fine art prints may have editions with differences between them. Old wood blocks by a famous artist may even be restruck decades later by a different person. They're still recognized as the piece.
There’s a really funny duality to mistakes in recorded art that is vastly different when viewed as a fan and the creator.
As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.
I hate editing mistakes more. The Aviator has quite a few of these where for example in cut A two characters talk by walking side by side, in cut B they stop and turn towards each other (still talking), and in cut C they continue the talking but you can see cut A and C are the continuation of each other and cut B was inserted in the middle https://files.catbox.moe/dljiiw.mp4
The only one I've ever noticed on my own in a long life of watching movies is the compressed air tank to overturn a chariot in Gladiator (2000).
I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it.
—Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...—
2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
Seeing the original live action footage reminds how challenging these productions must have been for the actors. There's nothing around you but green screen and a stunt rigger. The dialog sucks and you're little more than a puppet in these action sequences, week after week of shoots.
Lucas wanted to push the digital envelope, but the contemporary Harry Potter films also by ILM have aged much better because they relied on physical sets and practical effects as much as possible. You can tell the actors are actually within a world.
I have to agree with the article's author that what he calls "overzealous" removal of movie mistakes seems wrong. It wouldn't matter so much if the original movie was still readily available, but it's often the case that only the latest "fixed" version remains available.
With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse.
More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
Another infamous example is that they accidentally left a Starbucks cup on the table in the final season of Game Of Thrones: https://i.imgur.com/5tlRhti.png
Taking into account the already-negative reception of the final season, it became symbolic of the show's decline in quality. The cup was edited out in later releases.
Looking at the green screen shots of that Mustafar fight in Episode III: If that was the actual lighting of the in-camera scene, then it's not a mystery at all that everything in that movie looked so fake.
> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong.
As part of a restoration, yes. As part of a remaster, no.
If the remaster is overseen by the primary creative (such as everything done to the Aliens UHD 4k release, which was overseen and approved by Cameron), then it's official -- and as an audience member, you have to examine how you feel about that. For example, some enthusiasts lament the removal of film grain in Aliens, but Cameron has said in interviews that he hated the grain in Aliens because he was forced to use a particular film stock and didn't like the result. So it was never the director's vision to have excessive grain in that movie, and the audience should accept the 4k UHD release as canonical and authorized.
These debates are colored (no pun intended) by nostalgia, much like the vinyl vs. digital debates.
I noticed watching the recent 4K release of The Terminator that the garage attendant in the final scene has a piece of paper in his top pocket with "There's a storm coming“ written upside down on it.
In the referenced video, there's a clip from the movie Glory where a fair-skinned hand with a digital watch is in the frame. I like to think this must be a glib reference to Blake Edward's' The Party (1968) in which Peter Sellers dresses in dark face to play Hrundi V. Bakshi, who is introduced as a hapless Hollywood extra on the set of an Alamo-style Western. After a cut, the director asks Bakshi what time it is and Bakshi looks at his huge underwater wristwatch to tell him the time, then sheepishly realizes his mistake as the director goes apoplectic.
> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history.
How many times has Lord of the Rings been revised? Dune? <Insert other long-lived actively managed novel>. Is the active management of these novels "wrong"? Is fixing grammar, spelling, or clarifying story beats "wrong"?
I personally don't think so, and I'd rather read something which has been corrected, especially if done for story clarity.
We really couldn't get the name of the person whose face has been accidentally in a movie that's part of one of the great pieces of pop culture on modern history? Was really more interested to know who it was, what exactly he was doing, and what he thinks about it.
Does that Civil War movie have a modern electrical box in the background? Because that's what it looks like to me - totally distracted me from the watch.
I watched Aliens at least half a dozen times (still one of my all time favourites), and only noticed it when a friend pointed it out to us as it was playing at New Year’s party.
Great writeup, though a bit confusing to first refer to Anakin as Darth Vader when the scene takes place prior to that development in the Star Wars arc.
The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
(fxrant.blogspot.com)453 points by CharlesW 20 April 2025 | 170 comments
Comments
It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just mistakes.
Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it more modern-day.
I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd noticed and gone for another take. They take us out of the movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us in the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.
Anyway, movies can have revisions. A movie is as much a commercial product as it is art. I don't see why people need to get all righteous about it, especially in cases where directors, actors, etc., don't care.
Novels get revisions. Even fine art prints may have editions with differences between them. Old wood blocks by a famous artist may even be restruck decades later by a different person. They're still recognized as the piece.
As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.
And that's just one example that film is full of those. Here is another jarring one https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4
Despite that it won the Academy Award for Best Editing...
I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it.
—Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...—
2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
Lucas wanted to push the digital envelope, but the contemporary Harry Potter films also by ILM have aged much better because they relied on physical sets and practical effects as much as possible. You can tell the actors are actually within a world.
With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse.
More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
Taking into account the already-negative reception of the final season, it became symbolic of the show's decline in quality. The cup was edited out in later releases.
Family Guy also did a quick cutaway gag of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGIpZk4SKTI
As part of a restoration, yes. As part of a remaster, no.
If the remaster is overseen by the primary creative (such as everything done to the Aliens UHD 4k release, which was overseen and approved by Cameron), then it's official -- and as an audience member, you have to examine how you feel about that. For example, some enthusiasts lament the removal of film grain in Aliens, but Cameron has said in interviews that he hated the grain in Aliens because he was forced to use a particular film stock and didn't like the result. So it was never the director's vision to have excessive grain in that movie, and the audience should accept the 4k UHD release as canonical and authorized.
These debates are colored (no pun intended) by nostalgia, much like the vinyl vs. digital debates.
How many times has Lord of the Rings been revised? Dune? <Insert other long-lived actively managed novel>. Is the active management of these novels "wrong"? Is fixing grammar, spelling, or clarifying story beats "wrong"?
I personally don't think so, and I'd rather read something which has been corrected, especially if done for story clarity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Editio...