If you prefer dynamic movies over those slow-paced ones, we pressed the rewind button to check out some details that you might have missed. And guess what? There are some things that don’t make sense at all.

Rounders: Where is your dealer?

In the climactic showdown of Rounders (1998), Mike McDermott faces Teddy KGB in a high-stakes heads-up poker duel. The tension is palpable, chips clacking and cards flipping – yet one figure is conspicuously missing from the table: the dealer. The two players deal the cards themselves, a curious choice for an underground game with tens of thousands of dollars on the line. In real high-stakes poker, especially in a formal or casino setting, a dedicated dealer is practically a given, and this is true for both traditional settings and the cases when people partake in live tournaments for online poker real money games. 

Professional dealers manage the deck and betting, ensuring fairness and preventing any sleight-of-hand shenanigans. In fact, even many home games today employ a non-playing dealer or rotate a dealer button for exactly this reason – to keep players honest and the game running smoothly. Rounders portrays an otherwise gritty, authentic poker world, which is why the absence of a dealer in its big finale sticks out. As one poker analyst noted a decade after the film, Rounders showed most games being self-dealt even at high stakes – something you’d rarely see now. “Teddy KGB would play you for three racks of High Society, but he wouldn’t spring for a professional dealer. Nowadays, even home games have a dealer,” the analyst quipped, pointing out that keeping guys like Worm (the film’s crafty card mechanic) from dealing is a lesson poker took to heart. 

In real life, a high-stakes game without a dealer invites questions of integrity. A dealer isn’t just flipping cards; they’re an essential referee who upholds the rules and flow of the game, so leaving them out makes the scene feel a bit like a magic show missing its magician. It’s a small detail, but for poker aficionados it chips away at the realism of an otherwise revered poker film.

The Martian: Could a Martian storm really blow you away?

When The Martian (2015) opens with Mark Watney’s crew battling a ferocious dust storm on Mars, viewers are thrust into a life-or-death emergency that strands our hero on the Red Planet. It’s a thrilling kickoff – but scientifically, it’s on shaky ground. Mars does experience dust storms (even planet-wide ones), but they don’t pack the punch you’d expect. The film’s gale-force winds topple heavy equipment and threaten to tip a rocket, yet Mars’ atmosphere is so thin (about only 1% the density of Earth’s) that such winds would feel more like a breeze. NASA experts note that a 100-mile-per-hour Martian wind has roughly the same force as an 11 mph wind on Earth, not nearly enough to knock over spacecraft or send astronauts flying. 

In other words, the storm in The Martian is dramatically overblown (literally and figuratively). But why does this detail matter? In reality, future Mars explorers won’t fear being blown away by the wind; the real dangers of Martian storms are more about reduced sunlight (from dust blocking the Sun) and technical issues like dust getting into equipment. By portraying a supercharged storm, the film creates a scenario that actual Mars mission planners wouldn’t consider credible. 

So, the next time you see Mark Watney struggling against the howling Martian wind, remember: on the real Mars, he’d probably barely feel that breeze, and the biggest threat would be the dust coating his solar panels, not an unplanned Wizard-of-Oz flight across the desert.

Gravity: Can you really jet from Hubble to the ISS?

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) wowed audiences with its stunning depiction of orbit, following two astronauts desperately hopping from one space station to another after satellite debris destroys their shuttle. In the film, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) make an impromptu space odyssey: from the Hubble Space Telescope to the International Space Station, and later toward a Chinese station, all using a handheld jetpack and a Soyuz capsule. 

It’s an edge-of-your-seat journey – but one big detail doesn’t add up: orbital mechanics. In real life, you can’t just point your suit toward an object in orbit and jet over there in minutes. Satellites and stations orbit Earth at different altitudes and inclinations, which means they’re moving in very different paths and speeds. The Hubble orbits around 560 km up at a certain tilt, whereas the ISS is about 400 km high on a completely different orbital track. The film pretends these platforms are conveniently next door, but in truth “they’re so far apart…not only at different altitudes, but on different orbits – making it very unusual for them to even get within a few hundred miles of each other”, as the Washington Post writes. 

One of Gravity’s own science advisers explained that, at best, Hubble and the ISS might be separated by the distance from Los Angeles to Mexico City at closest approach – hardly a casual spacewalk away. Real astronauts would require a dedicated spacecraft and a lot of fuel to change orbits drastically (if it were even possible to time things right amidst orbiting debris). This cinematic liberty matters because it underscores just how vast space really is. Even orbiting relatively close to Earth, human outposts are usually isolated, and reaching one from another is not a simple matter of pointing and thrusting – it’s rocket science, literally, involving precise calculations and sometimes months of preparation. 

These were only a few of the scenes that present great cinematography but a poor projection of reality, whether it’s about casino game settings or space exploration. Of course, we all understand the need for compromises for the sake of a successful movie, but understanding reality is important too, as many people don’t watch movies just as a way to pass leisure time, but to learn and self-educate as well.