I’m not much for movies; I’m pretty much whatever the opposite of a “movie buff” is. Name your favourite film; I haven’t seen it. But I’ll tell you what I have seen — Knives Out. And I loved it! I could listen to Daniel Craig declare things as Benoit Blanc for hours on end, without the excuse of a plot, and I’d be totally content. Glass Onion, the sequel that hit Netflix just before Christmas, is good too. And it has come to my attention that there’s a car-related continuity slip in it — one I half-noticed while I’m watching, that I’m kicking myself for not fully appreciating sooner.
Don’t worry: if you haven’t seen Glass Onion yet, nothing here will be spoiled, except for the fact that one of the movie’s characters — the Elon Musk-spoofing Miles Bron — owns a Porsche 918 Spyder. He calls it “Baby Blue.” It’s his pride and joy, and it goes everywhere he does. Like on top of his private island resort, where we first see it, and it looks like this:
It’s mostly a normal-looking 918, in Liquid Metal Chrome Blue, which I feel is the best 918 colour. (It reminds me of the Isdera Commedatore 112i, the most perfect supercar ever.) But wait — what’s that near the back? That black winglet at the flank is a giveaway that we’re actually looking at a Weissach Package example here — a 918 with about 41 kg of weight savings and those aforementioned go-faster bits, including a rear wing in exposed carbon fibre.
The next time we see Baby Blue, though, it’s not sporting those winglets, as user theFettster on the Movie Mistakes subreddit explains:
If you want a clearer look at that second scene, here it is:
See, no blades at the side there, though the wing is in its “up” position now. (Unrelated, but I didn’t realise the Weissach Package wing could retract like the regular car’s; when the 918 was added to Gran Turismo 7 last summer, it was a Weissach model, with the wing perpetually extended, regardless of the car’s state. Apparently, that’s how the wing stays if you switch the car to Speed or Performance mode. If you keep the car in its Start configuration, it remains down.)
As long as we’re on the topic, Bron’s 918 Weissach also doesn’t have the magnesium GT-style wheels that come with the package. That’s neither here nor there, though, and the crux of this is the disappearance of those aero blades just behind the rear wheels. A week is said to transpire between the two scenes, so perhaps Bron had Porsche remove them in the interim. He arguably had other matters to tend to at the time though, so that explanation seems a little thin. I mean, what are we to believe — that this is some sort of a magic 918 with disappearing panels or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
I don’t, of course. I’m just mad at myself for not noticing the carbon fibre bits while I watched the other night, and wasting all my attention on the wing. As theFettster explains on Reddit, the likely explanation is that the car on the roof is very clearly a computer-generated model, and its finer details weren’t fully matched with those of the real-life 918 that appears later in the film. Still, we’ve all learned so much more about the Weissach Package as a result — so I’d say the blunder was well worth it.