Corrected entry: In the plane crash scene, Chuck is underwater and activates the self-inflatable life raft. The raft fills with air, and he is propelled to the surface. But a self-inflatable raft uses internal vacuum to pull outside air in. Underwater, it would fill with water. The red thing is not some air container either; it's likely a package of survival goods and is only attached by a tether.
Corrected entry: As the plane hits the water, Chuck falls backward, toward the rear of the plane. This violates the concept of inertia. He actually would have continued traveling forward toward the incoming water.
Correction: Actually he gets thrown back by the force of the water.
Corrected entry: Assuming Tom Hanks was going from Memphis to Kaula Lumpur (which I don't believe was actually discussed), the airplane as seen from the inside is either an MD-11 or possibly a DC10 with a glass cockpit. If so, the that route is beyond the range (9768 NM) of either airplane. It is even further to Sydney, Australia so I don't think that is very likely to have happened without a fuel stop, that didn't happen either.
Correction: We don't know that a refuel didn't happen, we just didn't see it on camera because it wouldn't really be interesting.
Corrected entry: When Noland is casually urinating into the ocean late one night we see a light on the horizon. It can only be from a passing ship. Noland doesn't react at all, and it is directly in his line of sight. He couldn't miss it.
Correction: Um, did you watch the rest of the scene? he literally sees the light when he's done urinating and says "ship!" and then yells "help" and shines his flashlight.
Correction: That's the entire point of the scene. When he looks in the direction of the light, it stops, and it's only visible when he's not looking. It's meant as a sad, "missed opportunity" scene.
What absolute nonsense. He is looking straight at it. In fact it is a light from a building on the island used as a filming location (Monuriki, Fiji) that the post production crew forgot to paint out, making it two different types of film mistake.
Corrected entry: The orientation of the plane is all wrong. Hanks goes into the bathroom, which is located aft of a crew door, and against the front of the cargo area. The bathroom on all the wide body aircraft (Airbuses, DC-10, MD-11) is located between the cockpit and the jumpseat area.
Correction: On some MD-11s the lav is located aft of the entry door 1R.
Corrected entry: Towards the end of the film, when Helen Hunt runs after Tom Hanks, she shouts "Jack! Jack!" It's not Chuck by any stretch of the imagination. (02:00:30)
Correction: I've watched and listed to the scene a number of times, and read the transcript. She says "Chuck", not "Jack." It almost falls in line with the McGurk effect, so it's possible to hear "Jack", but to state that's what she says is not correct. Very rarely have I seen a valid mistake regarding an actor calling a character the wrong name. It's almost always someone hearing something wrong, which isn't the actor's fault.
Correction: Note that the CH and J sounds at the beginning of a word are nearly identical. Kelly is actually saying "Chuck", but apparently because she is both running and shouting it comes out "Ch-YA-uck", so that anyone within earshot named either "Chuck" or "Jack" would turn around to see who was paging them. And on the final, third utterance she is saying "Chuck", with no YA meme.
Maybe they sound identical but it still count as a character error.
Continuity mistake: The final sequence of the film has a whole load of stuff different. Just before Chuck walks into the crossroad, we see there's a solid double yellow line on the main road, a dirt track to one side, and another road on the other side - that one has one solid & one dashed line on it. It cuts to a wider shot, and the dashed line has suddenly become solid, the Texas state sign has moved closer to the stop sign, and a big shadow (of a telegraph pole or similar) has appeared next to the stop sign. There's then another cut looking down the adjoining road - Tom Hanks' shadow's done a complete 180, the shadow of the telegraph pole's disappeared, the line's gone dashed again, and the Texas sign's moved away. Basically, in one 20 second clip at least 4 things change significantly - they used two very similar, but not identical junctions, for no good reason. A veritable spot the difference competition! (02:10:30)
Suggested correction: The sun angle does indeed swing wildly from side to side and above during the final scene which moves the shadows around, but it's the same intersection throughout. The dashed line appears to become solid in one of the shots, but the camera angle has changed which makes the dashes longer on the screen, and the other end of the final dash in that line cannot be seen, creating a strong illusion.
Corrected entry: The scene where he just got a fire going and is throwing logs on the fire on the beach, notice how calm the water is. Every other shot of the water has huge waves just to leave the island. Why didn't he just leave from the beach he had the fire on?
Correction: Because he didn't have a raft. The last one was damaged on his first attempt.
Corrected entry: When Tom Hanks says goodbye to Helen Hunt in the Jeep Cherokee at the airport, you can see the "Jeep" emblem above the grille. When he gets the car back back five years later, the emblem is gone.
Correction: There are many reasons why an emblem could be missing from a vehicle after five years. Someone could have stolen it, or it could have been defective and fallen off. There are a million cars on the road with missing emblems.
Corrected entry: It is clear when Tom Hanks is on top of the island, and when he sees the dead body, and also when he walks around the island, that the fringing reef does not extend all the way round the island. There is therefore no need to launch the raft into the breaking waves, it would be much easier to launch the raft at a place on the island where there are no breakers to contend with. (You can also see this in an aerial shot of the island on page 84 of the book "Nomads of the Wind").
Correction: There could be other reasons for other launching sites to be unusable. An inaccessible or particularly rocky beach, for example, or prevailing winds. He couldn't sail the raft into the wind to escape the island.
Correction: He pretty much had to launch the raft from the location where he built it. It was heavy, the island does not appear to be flat or have open spaces, so he could not have lugged it and all the supplies to a different location. Even if he could, it would risk damaging it. He built the raft where he had the best access to the needed materials.
Factual error: On Tom Hanks' doomed flight, there is no smoke curtain or solid bulkhead in place. This is a heavy, opaque curtain or solid wall that separates the the topside cargo area from the seating area, designed to keep smoke from a fire away from the crew. On DC10/MD11 aircraft, this is generally a solid bulkhead, and on Airbuses a curtain. This plane should have been grounded until one was installed.
Suggested correction: While some MD-11s at FedEx have a solid bulkhead, most do not and have this 9G net. I don't recall if they starting putting the smoke curtain in before or after they started flying the MD-11, but at one time FedEx only had the 9G net on their aircraft and no curtain.
Revealing mistake: When Kelly is copying her dissertation, there is no paper being fed through the copier feeder or any printed pages going into the output tray. (00:12:40)
Correction: Inflatable rafts do not "use internal vacuum to pull outside air in." They use compressed gas bottles located within the skin of the raft that are activated by a lanyard, exactly as shown in the scene.