National Treasure (2004) - 80 mistakes

Other: When Gates writes down the numbers from the back of the Declaration of Independence he forgets one number. On the document there are the following numbers: 11-6-6, 12-18-7, 14-3-7. Ben however only writes down 11-6-6, 14-3-7 and then keeps on.

Continuity: When Ben finds the glasses at Independence Hall, it is 3:20 because of daytime savings time. However when the bad guys chase Abigail and Riley in the market they pass a large clock showing the time to be 2:37.

Continuity: Right after the scene where the FBI break into Ben's apartment, Ian is puzzling over the clue from the Charlotte. He circles the phrase "in silence" but when he holds the notepad up to his friends, only the word "silence" is circled.

Continuity: When the two vans are driving away from the Archives, Dr. Chase tries to open the door to escape. As the camera pans from her face to the door handle, you can see by the way her hair moves that the quarter-second sequence is run in reverse.

Continuity: When Abigail keys in her password to the preservation room, she only presses the keyboard 9 times including the return key. If "Valley Forge" was the password, she would have had to have used at least 12 keystrokes (including the return key.)

Revealing: When Ben, Abigail, and Riley are fleeing the National Archives, the window on the driver's side has been shattered by a gunshot. Although they are driving at high speeds, no wind seems to be entering the van to mess up their hair.

Other: When Gates enters the password to enter the preservation room he accidentally hits the Caps Lock key instead of the "a" key.

Factual error: When Ben and Abigale and Reilly separate at Independence park Abigale and Reilly could not possibly have exited the park and run right into the Reading Terminal Market. Independence park (where the liberty bell is housed) is between 5th and 7th and Walnut Streets, and Reading Terminal Market (where Abigale hides from the bald man) is at 12th and Arch street. At least 15 blocks apart.

Deliberate "mistake": When Riley writes "S,S,A,N,D" on the paper, the kid points out how odd his N's are. But when he looks over the whole message, there are two normally written N's.

Factual error: Ben, Riley, and Abigail are driving into Philadelphia at sunrise to go to the Franklin Institute. They are shown driving west on the Ben Franklin Bridge. The sun is actually setting in the west behind Philadelphia, not rising.

Continuity: When the FBI storms into Ben Gates' apartment, an agent is researching the Silence Dogood letters on his Hewlett Packard laptop. However, the web browser displayed on his laptop is the Mac Safari browser. HP laptops don't run Mac software so the "photoshopped" shot of the web browser on the laptop was done on an Apple Mac.

Continuity: The school boy is counting letters on the Dogood letters and runs out to give them to Riley. As he crosses the street, he passes a cab and a Taurus station wagon. On his second trip out, he passes the same two cars again.

Continuity: When we see Ian's men pull up over the grate that they are going to go down through to get to the National Archive, we see the street wet so it had to have rained, been hosed down, etc. But when one of Ian's men drops a large bag down, it whirls up a huge cloud of dust when it lands. This shouldn't have happened because there was nothing over the tunnel but a grate and some water would have gone down the tunnel, wetting the dust.

Continuity: When Ben is at the Keypad ready to enter the password. We hear him read out the letters that where pressed by Abigail earlier. He reads out the letter L, but earlier when we see Abigail type the security code onto the keypad, she never presses the letter L.

Continuity: When Ian abducts Abigail, you see some one shoot at Ben and hit the hood of his van twice, but in another shot you do not see any bullet holes.

Continuity: When Gates is arrested by the FBI you see Riley and Chase coming around the corner twice.

Continuity: When they blow the back of the Declaration with the hairdryer, Ben writes down the numbers. When he explains to Reilly how an Ottendorf cipher works we see that there are 2 columns with 17 lines each. This leaves us with a possible 34 letters. However the riddle that they decipher from the Dogood letters have 89 letters in it. After Ben writes down the last letters Abigail switches off the dryer and we can also see that it was the end of the page so there is no way that there was more space to get more letters.

Factual error: When Ben meets Abigail for the first time in her office, he admires her collection of Washington's campaign buttons. In fact, there is no such thing as a Washington campaign button, since presidential campaigns (as we know them today, with a candidate declaring the desire to be president and actively promoting himself or herself) did not come into existence until the mid-1800's. Washington never "ran" for president. In fact, at the time it would have been considered very un-gentlemanly and arrogant to publicly express your interest in the office. There were however buttons made to commemorate his inauguration and his presidency itself (saying "Long Live the President", etc., but nothing like those seen in the film), and these are, indeed, collector's items.

Continuity: As Ian watches our heroes leave Independence Hall the clock in the tower reads 3:27. That gave Ben only five minutes to climb down the tower, dig out the brick, meet up downstairs, unroll the Declaration and decipher it, realize they're being followed, plan their escape and leave. It took me longer to write all of that.

Continuity: When Ben is in the Men's restroom taking off the overalls to reveal his tuxedo, he is in front of the third or back sink. He turns, throws tool belt away, turns back toward mirror and grabs his drill and starts to leave with the red NO SMOKING sign on the mirror up to his left. Then he stops to look in the mirror again as Riley says "How do you look?" He is looking into the mirror straightening his tie and the red NO SMOKING sign is on his right. The next frames he is back in front of the third sink smoothing his hair back and the NO SMOKING sign on his left.