Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) - 51 mistakes

Plot hole: In the final showdown, when Bond is fighting with Stamper, the girl is wrapped in a chain hanging from a crane and dropped in the sea. After the boat blows to bits, the chain continues to hang down even though there's nothing holding it. It even keeps hanging after Bond's swum down to untie her. What's keeping it there? Do all stealth battleships come with buoyant chains? With both arms at least partially free, why doesn't she just climb back up the chain?

Revealing: In the scene with the helicopter chasing them down the street, apart from the fact that the rotors should catch on something and hurl the machine into a wall, when it finally hits the wall at the end, the pilot and crew quite clearly become about 4 crash-test dummies. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that they are unpainted and all sit in their seats looking straight ahead with their hands in their laps while they are driven into a wall. You'd think they could have at least posed the arms over their faces or SOMETHING!

Factual error: As Bond is preparing for the HALO skydive, he is warned that he has to freefall for 5 miles and without oxygen he will be asphyxiated. However, he jumps from a non-pressurised aircraft. Surely when the back hatch opened, the other people standing around would either also start to suffocate or be sucked out.

Continuity: When James has just jumped out of the plane, he has a diving rig that is somewhat different to the one he has when diving on the wreck of the Devonshire. In the water he wears a twinset manifold air-bottle rig. While skydiving the rig was not manifolded and the bottles were in a different position on his back. To change between the two requires some work with a tool kit, preferably on dry land.

Continuity: Gupta, Carver's gadget man, proves that Paris, Carver's wife, knows Bond extremely well by showing Carver some secret footage taken at the cable tv launch party. In that footage Paris says to Bond "Tell me James, do you still sleep with a gun under your pillow? As she asks him this question, Bond can be seen looking down over the railing at the crowd below. Yet if you rewind a few minutes to the actual moment in the movie when she asks him this question, Bond is not looking down, he is, in fact, regarding her fixedly. They clearly reshot it (even her intonation of the question is different).

Continuity: In Bond's hotel room, after Dr. Kauffman has killed Carver's wife, he takes out the tape that has been playing, holds it up, and it's fully rewound.

Visible crew/equipment: When Bond and the Chinese woman are on the rooftop (just before they jump off) in one of the shots look closely and you can see the shadow of the crew on the wall (that they are facing).

Continuity: The helicopter, in the motorbike scene, does a strafing in a narrow road. That's absolutely impossible, as either some cloth would get clogged into the main rotor, or it would hit something and break. But that doesn't matter much, as the 'copter is going too slow to be tilted at that angle anyway.

Factual error: Both the Duke Class Frigates fire CRUISE MISSILES from the tubes. The tubes on the duke are purely for HARPOON missiles and cannot be reloaded.  Nothing in the missile room is actually used in the navy.

Continuity: The scene where there is a car chase with the very nicely equipped BMW, you could clearly see before the chase that the car was equipped with, I believe, five star rims, but in the scene it shows the back left tires having hubcaps instead of the five star rims.

Continuity: Near the beginning when Bond causes mayhem, he sticks a grenade onto a moving vehicle and dives off it. As he jumps off and attacks a bad guy his collar is up (to better hide the face of the stuntman), then when it cuts back to a proper shot of him his collar's suddenly down.

Continuity: In the BMW chase scene the back window is clearly blown out, however as the camera goes back on Bond it is intact, and then missing as the rocket launcher goes cleanly through moments later.

Continuity: As Bond is driving his BMW by remote control from the back seat, the bad guys shoot out the windshield with several machine guns and at least one rocket launcher. The damage to the interior of the BMW is substantial, most notably the bullet holes in the headrests in the rear seat. However, in a couple of subsequent shots the headrests are clean and undamaged, only to have the bullet holes suddenly re-appear in the following shots.

Visible crew/equipment: In the scene when James Bond is trying to escape while driving his BMW from the back seat with a remote control, there is a 1-2 second shot where you can very clearly see a stunt man sitting in the front seat driving and then the shot returns to James in the back seat.

Continuity: When the stealth ship tries to escape the English and Chinese navies, they say it's going 48 knots. But when we see it 'speeding' away, you can see by its wake that it is cruising very slowly. Definitely nowhere near 48 knots.

Continuity: In the scene where Bond is driving to his hotel room to find Paris dead, throughout several shots, the car window rolls itself up and down.

Continuity: During the car chase, Bond jumps into his car through a right hand side window. In one shot the front window is open, the camera changes to Bond. Then we see the back window is open and the front is closed. Bond jumps through the back window.

Deliberate "mistake": When Bond holds Carver against the computer so the big drill will kill him, you can easily see that the computer behind them isn't real. As the drill rips into the 'computer' it's all white inside, just like styrofoam. They probably used it as it gets destroyed easily and would make the drill look really powerful as bits of it flew everywhere.

Continuity: Carver is typing headlines for a story on the deaths of the British soldiers. In one shot, he types "killed" onto the large screen. In the immediately following shot, a reflection in his glasses shows the same word being typed again.

Continuity: In the scene where the ship is being confronted by the Chinese MiGs and is attacked by the stealth boat an alarm sounds on the ship and all the sailors in the mess hall leave and go to their battle stations. A few shots later when the drill hits the ship and water rushes in it shows three or four sailors in the mess hall getting hit by the rushing water.

Continuity: In the car chase in Hamburg, when Bond is in the back seat remotely driving the car, the car does a U-turn into another lane. After the car says "Reduce speed - pedestrians in roadway" there is a shot of the car's dashboard from inside the car, with the car travelling straight forward. The steering wheel, however, is tilted to the right, even though 1) The car is travelling straight and 2) The car had just made a LEFT turn.

Continuity: As soon as the BMW flies out of the car park and ends up in the Avis shop, an outside shot shows that there's a ruddy large hole on the middle of the bumper. Methinks that from pre-production notes found in a book, this hole is supposedly a outlet for magnetic mines, but during the car park chase, we don't see it being used.

Continuity: When Bond and Wei Lin are hanging from the poster halfway up Carver's Saigon skyscraper, they break a window to get back inside. In the first shot, before they even swing at it, there's a big white crack in it. In subsequent shots, the crack disappears and then reappears.

Continuity: In the pre-credits plane chase scene the aircraft behind Bond's fires two missiles. Bond avoids the missiles and they strike the side of the mountain, exploding in a huge ball of flame and smoke. The pilot chasing Bond pulls up quickly, almost crashing into the mountain and passing through the cloud of smoke from the missiles. The camera angle cuts immediately to an overhead shot and it is completely clear around the jet; the smoke cloud from the missiles has disappeared.

Visible crew/equipment: At the end of the bike chase, just as the helicopter crashes to the house, you can see the dummies in the seats.

Continuity: When the BMW drops off the roof and into the AVIS office, its trajectory is not consistent. It enters the AVIS office rather horizontally, but at that point in its trajectory it would have gone almost vertically.

Continuity: During the car chase in the parking garage, Bonds's remote-driven BMW has video camera lenses mounted on the forward-facing surfaces of the outside door mirrors. They are dark, round spots about 3/4" diameter. These were installed so the rear-seated stunt driver could sit low and unseen and still drive the car. This is all documented in the behind-the-scenes stuff on the DVD. Unfortunately, every shot of the car before the chase scene shows the mirrors to be the normal type with no cameras mounted in them.

Visible crew/equipment: When Q is showing the new BMW to Bond, Bond takes it for a spin via the remote. As it heads back to Bond and Q, you can see a driver as it passes the helicopter.

Continuity: When Carver is geting killed by the drill, he magically disappears when the drill hits the computer. He is quite a bit taller then it, but just vanishes as the drill starts to destroy the computer. Probably done to avoid a heavy blooded death scene.

Factual error: Carver's ship would not be even close to stealthy. Every angle and crevice on it, while cool looking, would be a beacon for radar. Nothing stands out on radar more than a right angle. A picture of the real stealth ship can be found here. http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/sea_shadow.htm

Continuity: When Wai Lin handcuffs Bond to the water pipe (after the motorbike chase) she has a red shirt on over a white vest. When she turns to walk away the red shirt has disappeared.

Continuity: The Chinese agent handcuffs Bond to the shower. Then she is running away and you can see her from the back picking up a piece of clothing. Her hair is completely dry, although she was under the shower with Bond only a few seconds ago.

Continuity: During the chase scene on the motor bike you can clearly see the Chinese agent's arm extend as they are going down some stairs proving that it's a fake arm, obviously so the rider is not as restricted as he would be if he were really handcuffed.

Visible crew/equipment: When the BMW shoots the car with his car rocket launcher, the rocket then hits the car, sending it flying back, you are able to see a set of wires leading under the car then off screen.

Plot hole: One of the most memorable aspects of this movie is the motorcycle/helicopter chase scene. There are machine guns firing hundreds of rounds, there's a motorcycle leaping from rooftop to rooftop, and a large helicopter performing some amazing aerial stunts, then eventually crashing. All of these things happen in a very crowded part of the city. Yet after the crash, Bond and Wei Lin walk from the courtyard area where most of the action has taken place to the street just on the other side of the buildings, and no one seems to have noticed gunfire, the exploding helicopter, etc.

Continuity: There is a shot from behind a video camera, showing a wire or cable coming out of the back of the video camera, however, in all subsequent shots the wire/cable is not present.

Audio problem: Towards the end, Bond fires with a silencer but the shot is much louder than it should.

Continuity: James and M are travelling in the motorcade. The privacy barrier is lowered to reveal that Moneypenny is in the front-passenger seat. The shot changes to an exterior shot of the limousine. You can clearly see the privacy divider rising during this shot. The shot returns to the interior of the limousine for more dialog. Then the shot returns to Moneypenny for her to say that James will have to decide how much "Pumping" is required. Once again you can see the privacy divider rise.

Continuity: When James breaks into the lab on the roof, he replaces his phone in his inside left jacket pocket. When he goes to fry the security lock on the office door, he pulls it from his inside right jacket pocket.

Factual error: During the motorcycle chase scene, Wai Lin shouts something at the crowd in the street. Unfortunately the presumably Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese agent shouts in Cantonese at a bunch of Vietnamese. She may as well have used English...

Factual error: A Type 23 Duke Class Frigate is used as 'flagship' for the fleet at the end of the film. The Type 23 is way too small and undermanned to act in such a capacity; it has no command and control facilities. They should have used at least a Type 22 Batch 3 Frigate, a carrier or an LPD (Landing Ship). We also see the evidence of a fleet on their radar screen, but nothing more of them.

Other: When Carver is typing Bond's obituary on the big screen, he hits many more keys than would be necessary to write the end of the sentence.

Visible crew/equipment: James hurls a Heavy in a red jacket into a printing press; as he breaks the paper, you can just make out a black crash mat.

Continuity: In the garage chase scene, when the rocket goes through the BMW they show the shot of the side of the BMW; right as the rocket reaches where the front window was you can see that the rocket turns into more of a bottle rocket type thing as it goes through the car.

Continuity: During the bike chase scene, the following Range Rover loses its indicator lens in one shot, only for it to re-appear in the next.

Continuity: During the remote-control BMW car chase scene, there are a couple of clear shots of the steering wheel of the BMW shown not moving at all as the BMW is making violent turns, demonstrating that the steering wheel itself is not a part of the remote steering mechanisim within this particular vehicle. However, subsequent shots show the steering wheel spinning wildly in either direction as the car is going through its paces during the rest of the chase.

Factual error: To know this you have to live in Hamburg, Germany : The hotel park deck Bond's BMW is chased on is on the left side of the big shopping street. But his jump across this street is from the right to the left.

Continuity: In the scene where James is trying to escape from Carver's headquarters, a black guy holds him over the newspapers being printed.  In one shot the back part of his tie (that hides behind the larger front part usually) is hanging by his ears, it cuts to a shot of the black guy and when it cuts back, the back part of the tie has risen back to its proper place against his chest.

Continuity: When Bond parks the BMW, the tyres are turned slightly to one side. When the bad guys come to break into it, they're perfectly aligned with the body of the car.

Visible crew/equipment: When Bond and the Chinese agent are being chased by the bad guy's helicopter across the roof tops of Shanghai, the film crew's helicopter can be seen towards the top right hand side of the screen when the camera cuts to the front view of Bond on the motorbike. The next shot of the chase is then filmed from this helicopter.

Continuity: Bond takes a watch from Wai Lin's computer-weapons room. The watch is shown to be an Omega Seamaster, the exact same model worn by Bond earlier in the film, but with a few improvements made by Wai Lin's organization, according to her. This model of watch is equipped with a helium escape valve, a knob located on the perimeter of the case at the 10:00 O'clock postion. The close-up of the watch shows this. Later, Bond removes a small remote-controlled detonator from the watch which has the helium escape valve control knob attached to it. The close-up insert shot shows that the knob is no longer attached to the watch at the 10:00 O'clock position, and the close-up shot of the rigged grenade-in-a-jar bomb shows the control knob as a part of the detonator. When Bond and Stamper have their final show-down at the end of the film, there are many shots showing Bond's watch and the helium escape valve control knob is inexplicably back in place on his watch.