Granted, it's a small detail, but now that I've seen it, I'll never be able to unsee it. I was watching a period piece where one of the characters was wearing eyeglasses, and I spotted the faint green sheen of anti-glare coating which wasn't around when the piece was set. It's like seeing a seamless beer can in a movie set in the 1950s, a tiny detail, easy to miss, but completely wrong for the time.
pretty good attention to detail there! Yes I'm sure it's nearly impossible to weed everyone out that might not fit the period.
The last one I caught was that "Shannara" series (not as awful as I thought it would be). One of he characters/actresses was wearing obviously machine-stitched jeans.
After "thousands of years", I hardly think so...Neither would zippo lighters, functioning hand guns, etc, etc...
If I can deal with characters having teeth that belong on a modern dental poster rather than the decaying swamps they would have been then I can forgive period shows anything.
This could actually have been something made with filming in mind, lest the glasses constantly reflect light from all the lighting rigs being used, or any other ambient sources of light.
Pet peeve: Assuming modern speeds for information. "Oh, you'come straight from the great battle at Uqibix? Do come in and tell us all about it, you're the first eye witness we've met." If he's come straight from there and is the first to reach you, you have no business knowing there ever was a great battle; and frankly, since these are the late middle ages at best, it's highly unlikely that you know there is a Uqibix in the first place. We are so used to electrical means of communication that we just assume people knowing about a fact is something that follows from the fact happening.
I thought a common mistake was flip light switches from anything prior to the late 1950s. IIRC, light switches up to that time were mostly twist on and off. A lot like a stove or portable fan switch.
There were push button, twist, pull cord, and flip switches prior to the 1950s. What you had was dependent upon things like location and income level.
In almost all movies, caves are never really dark, their just dimly lit. In reality, instead of something like the 2 trillion optical photons per second per square meter you'd have in extremely low light conditions (such as a moonless overcast night), or 2 billion trillion photons of direct sunlight, there are zero photons per second.
You are basically right, the assumption of speed is definitely there. But it's not as bad as you make it out to be. Great battles weren't random most of the time. They had maps, they had strategic information and they usually knew where paths would cross. At least the boss back in his castle had a pretty good idea what was going to happen and when. The random peasant on the other hand, not so much.
Not sure I agree. IIRC. In WORld war 1 Haig wrote in his journals several hours into major battles wondering how things were going
My wife is a bit of a period costuming enthusiast, so she picks out things like that. Seeing pantyhose before it was invented is one of her pet peeves.
