…OK, last night I watched Terminator Genisis and spotted a bit of a continuity error. This is a picture of the bus they were escaping in somersaulting on the Golden Gate bridge. I didn’t see this the first time, but went back later to look at it frame by frame. The reason I went back to look at it was because it occurred to me as I saw more exteriors of the the bus that it was ‘pusher’ engine. IE, the engine is in the back, not the front.
Now wait a minute! The reason why the bus was somersaulting end over end on the bridge was because the evil hybrid John Conner / Terminator had grabbed a hold of the drive shaft when he was under the bus about half way to the front and sawed it in half with his bare hand, causing a pole vaulting effect. * But if the engine is in the back, there’s no drive shaft going to the front of the bus, because there isn’t an engine there, because as mentioned previously, the engine is in the back. The picture clearly shows an axle facing backwards towards a transmission with a very short drive shaft.
In the scene the camera is in front of the bus as the bus is moving towards camera. And no there wasn’t a shot of the full bus that shows the front of the bus in the up position and the rear in the down position and include all the details of the drive train. But if the bus is moving towards the camera and it did a front flip, up is the front, and down is the rear of the bus. Watch the movie if you want to verify it.**
And on a final thought, look at the detail the animators put into that. There’s no way to see the bottom of the bus in real time. You can only see it in stop motion, but they went to the trouble of putting that detail there. Hats off to them. Very good work. To bad the entire movie didn’t have that same attention to detail. It would have been great if they had.
* Myth Busters disproved for another movie that pushed the narrative that a drive shaft on a rear wheel drive car could catapult it in a pole vault manner.
** Skillful method that they used to write Arnold back into the movie, but over all a bit of a lame movie, so I’m not recommending it.
