Factual error: The terrorist with the AK47 is unaware of the fact that a Harrier is hovering just outside the window until he slowly turns and see it there. He does a double take when he sees the Harrier just five metres away! A Harrier is an incredibly loud aircraft; you can hear them from three kilometers away. At that range the floor would shake with the noise and he would have been in no doubt whatever that he had been under attack for some time.
Factual error: When the bus is driving over the gap in the freeway, it jumps off at an angle. And when it lands, it lands close to perfection. If the bus landed at the same angle it jumped off on, the bus would either tip over or the 2 tyres would burst.
Factual error: The military ranks for everyone but O'Neil are wrong. O'Neil is a Colonel (Full bird), Kawalsky is wearing the insignia of a Lt Colonel, but is referred to by O'Neil simply as Lt., when he should be called Colonel. All the others are wearing enlisted stripes (Ferretti - TSgt, but is credited as Lieutenant Ferretti), the others are also credited as "Lieutenant", but wearing enlisted stripes.
Factual error: A bunch of troops are in heavy camouflage in helicopters, going to an assignment. The officer in charge tells them to take their dog tags off and empty their pockets of anything that could identify them. This is silly: first, in troop helicopters, the troops wouldn't be able to hear the officer's voice - it's too noisy - and second, this would be ingrained in them, to remove dog tags etc, and would have been done back at the base, before they left.
Factual error: When Wyatt (Kevin Costner) becomes the sheriff/deputy/policeman of Wichita, Kansas, you can plainly see mountains in the background - there aren't any around there.
Factual error: At the end of the movie, they show a bunch of ducks flying. Those are not ducks, they are geese.
Suggested correction: This was intentional. This is a mostly Minnesotan team and the team is going home. While geese are technically speaking not ducks, they are the state bird of Minnesota and fly in a very similar manner to ducks. This was meant to be a symbolism of them going home to their state.
Factual error: We're told they carbon dated the gold to determine its age. Problem is, the gold hasn't aged by the normal processs - as it's been brought forward in time it will appear to be extremely new. As such carbon dating wouldn't work. Also, carbon dating only works on things that were alive and absorbed carbon-14; gold, having never been alive, could not be dated this way.
Factual error: There is a shot with Wesley Snipes and Gary Busey aiming one another just to pull the triggers and discover that the guns are out of ammo. In fact, after the last shot (of the pistol, not the movie) the slide of a semi automatic pistol is retained open by the empty magazine, and doesn't return forward as we can see in the shot (of the movie, not the pistol). The reverse mistake is very common in movies, when the armorer loads just one round to be shot (in the movie as well as the gun) and the actor keeps fighting or menacing with an unloaded, breech opened gun.
Factual error: When Julia Roberts drives away from the building where she finds the dead body of the boy with "LD" written on his hand, it is raining heavily. Yet, as she accelerates, there is an extended sound of tyres screeching on a dry surface.
Factual error: Near the end of the film, after Ditch and Krista use the reserve parachute, they fall in a windfarm. The windmills are spinning fairly slowly. After the fight Ditch pulls Pinkwater's parachute out. The wind pulls Pinkwater back towards the fan. Before he gets chopped up there is a shot of the fan blades spinning very fast and powerfully. A light breeze would not cause these blades to spin in this fashion. A hurricane would be needed for those blades to chop up a human.
Factual error: In the first scene, when Sylvester Stallone is in Colombia, the city that is named is Bogota. But that is impossible, Bogota is a metropolis of 7,000,000 people, one of the largest and most developed cities in South America, not a jungle.
Factual error: When Snowflake is being stolen at the beginning, he makes the high-pitched noise that dolphins make even when he is out of the tank; those high peals are made underwater through carrying sound. He wouldn't sound the same out of the water as he did under it.
Factual error: It is physically impossible to snow machine from the arctic circle area to Valdez in one day, as Steven Segal does.
Factual error: In the first scene of the movie, a diver is underwater, and he is talking to someone on the radio. How can he talk, when he is biting down on the mouthpiece from his scuba tanks? And his mouth is obviously not moving. (00:00:40)
Factual error: We are told at least twice that the airport scenes take place at Newark International Airport (now Newark Liberty Airport) in New Jersey, but one shot shows a sign that reads "Bienvenue a Montreal," showing where the scene was actually filmed.
Factual error: The grenade that the SWAT team fires in the hotel is supposedly a smoke bomb, but it is both marked ILUM and has a white body, meaning that it is an illumination grenade.
Factual error: When Eric goes to help the guy who got hurt after bungee jumping at the dance, the guy's line is long enough to allow him to lay flat on the ground. If it was really that long he would have crashed into the floor and not gone back up.
Factual error: While Gary Busey is breaking out of prison, he crawls over a small wall (it is no more than four feet high). However, he takes great pain to swing his legs and body over to the top of the wall, and then is momentarily stuck on top, before finally getting over. For a member of a special ops team, he is clearly out of shape.
Factual error: When the red BMW hits the curb just before joining the freeway he does so at 70. Hitting the curb at 70 would cause a blowout. (00:17:10)
Factual error: A bottle of champagne in space rotates around its centre of mass, not the midpoint of its axis of symmetry.