MovieChat Forums > Forever (2014) Discussion > Excruciatingly Painful Goofs & Silly Cli...

Excruciatingly Painful Goofs & Silly Cliches

posted 9 years ago by travisjamesmay
2 replies | jump to latest

Now despite the title of this post, I do enjoy this show. But, it's also really tried my patience many times.. I'm not one at all to point out factual flaws, or other various sorts of goofs, and I have no problem holding my "suspension of disbelief" throughout most films. "Forever" though...has consistently made such absurd goofs that I had to come make this post. (my first post on IMDB despite being a regular user and forum reader for years)

A couple of the more egregious ones:

1) Brought to you by episode 12:

Apparently at least one of the Baldwin brothers can't do basic math, because if he could, he would have refused - out of sheer shame and embarrassment - to say this little beauty on screen:

"our clients tend to be pretty satisfied with us, it's a handy byproduct of generating wealth for them that combined annually, is greater than the GDP of western Europe"

I cringed with embarrassment hearing this. It's one of those errors that you know just intuitively is off by at least an order of magnitude. It's not a matter of specifics or knowing anything about economics or finance. It's a matter of not stating "300,000 miles" when someone asks you to approximate the distance between LA and Seattle...

Some math:

- The largest asset management firm right now is BlackRock with $4.7 trillion in assets under management.
- The GDP of ENGLAND ALONE is $2.94 trillion
- Let's be generous and say that BlackRock earns 10% on their assets under management. This gives us $0.47 trillion.
- RESULT: in this scenario, the GDP of England alone is over 6.0 times greater than the return generate by THE LARGEST ASSET MANAGEMENT FIRM IN THE WORLD.

- Let's add just Germany and France to the mix (still not all of Western Europe...)
- Let's cut the assets under management in half (which is still greater than 95%+ of the asset management firms in existence)
- RESULT:GDP of the three countries combined is 40 times greater than our fictional asset management firm.

Another way to look at it: the 10 largest asset management firms in the world have less than $15 trillion under management. Using a 10% return, it would take roughly $100 trillion in assets under management to match the GDP of England, Germany, and France combined.

2) .... the above post went longer than expected, will post later..

[–] tenement-funster 9 years ago

Boasting man over-exaggerates wildly. That's never happened before.

The show did come up with some howlers - the use of the word vector, just to pull one from thin air - but all shows are full of mistakes. We don't notice them all, but they're there. It's just a question of what you're personally willing to forgive in order to enjoy a show.

In the end, it's a show about an immortal doctor, who uses his two-hundred-year-long memory to assist a detective in solving murders. One probably shouldn't be expecting it to fully exist in the real world.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I find concussion quite invigorating.

[–] Je_Notter 9 years ago

Simply hyperbole...

The worst errors I found was he "found" Abraham in Auschwitz. 1) English soldiers did not liberate Auschwitz - the Russians did 2) He is wearing an US medic helmet but he didn't emigrate to NY until after the war.

But I really enjoyed the show.