Wild Wild West (1999) - 33 mistakes

Continuity: During the fight inside the spider, West wraps one of Loveless' men in a chain and kicks him out the door. You clearly see that the chain comes completely off the its roll and falls to the ground, presumably with the body. Yet later on in a wide shot of the spider you can see the body and chain still suspended from the spider. Then when it crashes, West uses the hanging body to save himself.

Continuity: When Gordon and West are chasing Loveless in the train. They pass through a tunnel. On the other side of the tunnel, Loveless has elevated his train on crutches to hide as West and Gordon's train goes under Loveless' train.  During the shot where you look through to the end of the tunnel there are no crutches showing where Loveless is hiding. In the very next scene you are looking back into the tunnel from the end and the crutches of Loveless' train are now there at the end of the tunnel. Then Loveless' train lowers back onto the track.

Visible crew/equipment: When Jim West is hanging by the rains of the horse you can see the rider's boot as Jim West is telling the horses to back up.

Factual error: When they show the capital building in Washington DC it is still under construction, but it was actually finished in 1864 - 5 years before the movie's set.

Continuity: While Artemis Gordon is doing his "martial arts warm-up," Jim West is in a relaxed fighting stance from one camera angle, but just standing up from another.

Continuity: When Gordon and West are in the White House (after the real president Grant walks in), Gordon is shown removing his false stomach and tucking his shirt in. In one scene, the shirt is almost totally tucked in, in the next scene, the shirt is pulled back out of his pants. He then tucks the shirt back in again (for the second time).

Continuity: In the scene where the "Do not push" button is pushed for the first time, Jim West is launched on to the pool table and strapped down by two harnesses. However the lower harness shoots out between his legs, only strapping his right leg. In the next shot both legs are strapped down.

Revealing: In the scene where Will Smith first jumps aboard the rear of Loveless's train, as he climbs onto the roof of it you can see contrails from a jet aeroplane in the sky (top left).

Revealing: It's painfully obvious that CGI backgrounds in panorama shots are fake. A good example is just after they get their magnetic collars off and are walking through the desert.

Factual error: The amount of nitroglycerin in just one bottle at the beginning of the movie would be enough to level the whole brothel. Yet, when a cart loaded with bottles of nitro (or at least one full crate) goes downhill and explodes, it only makes a big fireball.

Continuity: When Artimus is showing Rita the billiard balls on the Wanderer, they are all stipes, but when Arti puts his hand back down on the pool table a few frames later, a red solid is in his hand.

Other: As the tarantula approaches the first small desert town (when Lovelace orders Grant to surrender the government to him), look at the townsfolk. Not one of them pays any attention to the noisy, giant metal spider as it lumbers towards the town. In fact, none of them react at all until the first building explodes. I guess giant spider robots were a common sight in the middle of the 19th century West.

Factual error: Gordon shines a light through the back of the disembodied scientist's head to project his last visual image onto a screen. When the image on the screen is inverted Gordon remarks that "Refraction of the lenses causes the image to appear upside down". True; when an image passes through the lens at the front of the eyeball the lens inverts the image and it is upside-down when it hits the retina. However, Gordon is projecting the captured image on the retina back through the lens of the eyeball and onto the screen. When the image passes back out the lens would invert the upside-down image and return it to its proper orientation. The image should have been right-side up when it hit the screen.

Factual error: West and Gordon are outfitted with massively powerful magnetic collars. Somehow the two collars don't interact with each other at all until they try to remove them, when they prove able to attract each other from at least 20 meters. Gordon rationalizes this by saying that they accidentally reversed one magnet's polarity, but if this were so then the magnets should have originally opposed each other with the same force, instantly throwing each other apart as soon as they were brought within meters of each other. Nonsensical.

Continuity: In the scene where Will Smith fights the man with the hearing device, in one scene he doesn't have it. One count later from an opposite direction he as it back again

Factual error: The Secret Service was created under Abraham Lincoln's presidency in 1865, not under Ulysses S. Grant's.

Continuity: When Kevin Kline hits Will Smith's metal collar after jumping in the mud, they become magnetised and Kevin's collar sticks above Will's. In the next scene Will's is on top.

Continuity: When Will, who is black, is in the carriage, he is the only person on it. When you see a close up of the horses, you can see a white persons foot dangling from the carriage.

Revealing: When Loveless removes the pin connecting the cart to the horses with the nitro in crates, it begins to roll down the cliff. There are already tracks for the cart to follow as it goes off the edge.

Continuity: In the shot where McGrath punches West in the face, he has the hearing thing in his ear. Next shot, when he runs away, he doesn't have the hearing thing in his ear.

Factual error: In the scene where Grant is trying to drive the railroad spike in at Promontory Point, current 50-state US flags are visible on the train.

Factual error: At the beginning of the movie, we see that the scientist who was killed was wearing his glasses. Hence, his last image would have been a clear one. Of course, the whole process of projecting a man's last sight by means of a light shone through his retinas is preposterous.

Continuity: When the giant metal spider approaches, the bridge moves from side to side and up and down. But in the next close-up everybody on it is standing upright with no problems.

Continuity: During the brothel scene, Loveless is seen near the cart containing nitro-glycerine. We see him pull the hinge out of the cart and the cart rolls down the hill and into the brothel. Now there's two things wrong with this scene. First, it wasn't a small hill, it was a small cliff that was near the brothel. And second, where did the horses pulling the cart go?

Continuity: At the start of the movie, when Artemis is dressed as a woman, they show several wide/angle crowd scenes. In one of these you can see Artemis's false nipples pressed against his dress. Yet later when he shows Jim his false breasts, they are smooth with no nipples.

Continuity: When West and Gordon are being chased by Loveless in their trains they are riding on a straight (as we can see from their over the shoulder shots). Yet when Loveless fires the cannon at them, the shot shows the back of the train and a small hill being hit by the shot, the train is turning a corner as this happens. But when we see the O-T-S camera shot again, the train is back on a straight track. Where did the hill come from?

Continuity: After the cornfield scene and the heroes fall into the mud river, their clothes and metal collars are seen to be covered in mud. In the next scene featuring them, their clothes are muddy but their metal ring collars are totally unmarked.

Factual error: The nitroglycerine would have exploded when McGrath's men threw it roughly onto the cart, leaving no risk of it exploding later when West makes his comment that this is not the way you transport nitro.

Continuity: In the scene where Jim West is walking up to the White House we can see different shadows: the ones generated by the bodies of people in the street go one way, but we can clearly see that the white house dome has light coming from the same direction as the people's shadows are going. The White House's shadow goes in the right direction for the light.

Factual error: In one scene Jim West is walking up to the White House. There is a cast-iron gate surrounding the White House, as there is today, but he gate was not added until the 1930's.

Factual error: As Jim and Artemus leave the White House heading for the Wanderer, they both head south. However, if they're taking a train from Washington to the west in 1869, they've got to use the B&O's track. The B&O station was north of the White House.

Continuity: As the tank pulls out of the lagoon, it has no seaweed on it until it is fully out of the water.

Continuity: In the shot of the brothel we see Bloodbath McGrath turning down his hearing aid and ear wax comes out onto uniform, but when they go back to him it's gone, and there's no stain on the uniform.