corn in movies in mesopotamia

We watched « the Eternals » last night, and there is one scene that made us laugh a little. At some point, early-ish in the movie, the main characters are in Babylon, in 5000 BC, and Sersi is helping the local population to plant some crops, which appear to be corn.

The problem is that corn didn’t exist in that area at that time. Corn as a crop was domesticated in the Americas about 7000-8000 years ago and brought back to Europe, where it spread, in the 15th and 16th century after Christopher Columbus made the journey. Also, it looks like Sersi is replanting corn seedlings, which wouldn’t really happen: you plant a corn seed and harvest it when fully grown (although I wish I could irrigate our fields as easily as she did).

Now, you could say that the impact on the plot of the movie is non-existant, since it’s a 30-second scene in an almost 3-hour movie, or that it’s a science-fiction movie so anything is possible, or that this is pretty niche so not a lot of people would notice it. All I can say is that as a viewer, I feel like it’s always the small details that make you believe in the movie, and that for us, for a few minutes, the illusion was actually broken.

It would have been pretty easy to get that scene right, especially for that type of movie, which I assume has a pretty big budget.

Small details always trip you up.