One thing that annoys me on TV shows and movies is getting the details wrong. Yes it’s fiction and yes some things can’t be done correctly and in some situations correctly portraying things goes against the plot. But otherwise I think they should try to make it accurate.
I was just watching The Americans (a generally good show that I recommend watching) and in Season 4 Episode 9 there’s a close up of a glass of wine which clearly shows that the Tears of Wine effect is missing, the liquid in the glass obviously has the surface tension of water not of wine. When they run a show about spies then have to expect that the core audience will be the type of detail oriented people who notice these things. Having actors not actually drink alcohol on set is a standard practice, if they have to do 10 takes of someone drinking a glass of wine then that would be a problem if they actually drank real wine. But they could substitute real wine for the close up shots and of course just getting it right the first time is a good option.
Some ridiculous inaccuracy we just need to deal with, like knives making a schwing sound when pulled out of scabbards and “silenced” guns usually still being quite loud (so many people are used to it being wrong). Organisations like the KGB had guns that were actually silent, but they generally looked obviously different to regular guns and had a much lower effective range.
The gold coins shown on TV are another ridiculous thing. The sound of metal hitting something depends on how hard it is and how dense it is. Surely most people have heard the sounds of dropping steel nuts and ball bearings and the sound of dropping lead sinkers and knows that the sounds of items of similar size and shape differ greatly based on density and hardness. A modern coin made of copper, cupro-nickel (the current “silver” coins), or copper-aluminium (the current “gold” coins) sounds very different to a gold coin when dropped on a bench. For a show like The Witcher it wouldn’t be difficult to make actual gold coins of a similar quality to iron age coin production, any jeweller could make the blanks and making stamps hard enough to press gold isn’t an engineering challenge (stamping copper coins would be much more difficult). The coins used for the show could be sold to fans afterwards.
Once coins are made they can’t be just heaped up. Even if you are a sorcerer you probably couldn’t fill a barrel a meter high with gold coins and not have it break from the weight and/or have the coins at the bottom cold welded. Gold coins are supposed to have a precise amount of gold and if you pile them up too high then the cold welding process will transfer gold between coins changing the value. If someone was going to have a significant quantity of gold stored then it would be in gold ingots with separators between layers to prevent cold welding.
Movies tend not to show coins close up, I presume that’s because they considered it too difficult to make coins and they just use some random coins from their own country.
Another annoying thing is shows that don’t match up the build dates of objects used. It’s nice when they get it right like the movie Titanic featuring a M1911 pistol which is something that a rich person in 1912 would likely have. The series Carnival Row (which I recommend) has weapons that mostly match our WW1 era, everything that doesn’t involve magic seems legit. One of the worst examples of this is the movie Anna (by Luc Besson which is mostly a recreation of his film Nikita but in the early 90s and with the KGB). That film features laptops with color screens and USB ports before USB was invented and when color screens weren’t common on laptops, as an aside military spec laptops tend to have older designs than consumer spec ones.
I’ve mostly given up on hoping that movies will get “hacking” scenes that are any more accurate than knives making a “schwing” sound. But it shouldn’t be that hard for them to find computer gear that was manufactured in the right year to use for the film.
Why can’t they hire experts on technology to check everything?
Ha, this post is good enough that I created an account to leave this comment. Honestly, I think you’re paying way more attention that most people, at most I would have thought about the laptops part and weapons era, but to be honest, I had no idea gold is heavy enough that cold welding happens in normal life!
Thanks for the post!