National Treasure (2004) - 80 mistakes

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.

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 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 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: 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 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.

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: As a librarian, I was amazed that the main characters in the movie time and time again touched the document without gloves. The oils on their hands would have caused this old document to crumble.

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.

Factual error: When Dr. Chase receives the Washington campaign button from Ben Gates, she immediately picks it up with her bare fingers and rubs it with her thumb. An expert collector would *never* handle metal objects with their bare hands like this, as the acid on the fingers will corrode the metal. Cleaning the coin afterwards is also not an option, as this presents an even higher damage risk. See http://www.stujoe.com/content/view/30/34/ for more details.

Continuity: When Riley is first looking at the special glasses the lengths of the stems of the glasses change from shot to shot. Sometimes they are halfway extended and sometimes they are fully extended.

Other: When Nicolas Cage puts on the thumb cover, he lightly dabs it in that purple stuff so he can pull Abigail's thumbprint off the glass. The very next shot is a close-up of the thumb cover, which is now somehow covered in that purple stuff - even on the back of his thumb.

Continuity: When they get ready to climb into the tunnel left by removing the coffin, Ian says, "McGregor, Phil. You stay here." When you see the people coming through the tunnel, it's not Viktor and Shaw as you would expect but Shaw and McGregor. Don't know if Sean blew his line, the writers got the characters mixed up or the actors blew it, but something went amiss.

Continuity: Ben dipped the George Washington button in a liquid solution. But, when he puts it into the gift box, it is considerably larger.

Factual error: When Gates is talking to Ian under the Trinity Church, he says that Thomas Newton placed the lantern in the Old North Church to signal how the British were coming. However, it was the Church sexton, Robert Newman, who actually placed the lanterns. Even though Ian probably wouldn't know the difference, surely three historians (Patrick Gates, Ben Gates, and Dr. Chase) would have known the correct person in so important an event in American history. There was no reason to throw Ian off track by saying this, since he didn't even know how many lanterns were placed.

Continuity: When Sadusky has Ben handcuffed across the desk from him, there is nothing on the desk directly between Sadusky and Ben except Sadusky's coffee mug, a gray thing that is about mid-way between Ben and Sadusky, and a white spiral notebook to the right of the coffee mug. Then Ben says, "Ian still ended up with the Declaration of Independence," and as the shot switches from Ben to Sadusky saying, "Because of you," we see the glasses Ben found at Independence Hall appear on the desk in front of Sadusky between the gray thing and himself. Then as Sadusky says, "Someone's got to go to prison, Ben," and Ben says, "Yeah," two short stacks of papers appear on the desk in front of Sadusky and the glasses changes position as well.

Other: When Ian is breaking in to take the Declaration of Independence his team uses a plasma cutter to cut through some metal. A plasma cutter of that size (fairly small and portable, but able to cut through metal of that thickness) requires a 220v power supply and a compressed air supply. I doubt there was a 220v power plug in that area, and I didn't see them carrying around any kind of compressed air tank.

Factual error: When Ben and Riley are in a reading room in the Library of Congress, they have books about the architecture of buildings, as well as books about security and such. However, the particular reading room they are in contains books about Social Sciences, and to order books from a different area, it takes a really long time. They would have been in a different reading room that contained books about their subject.

Visible crew/equipment: Three times you can see lens flare as the camera is pointing towards the sun: the airborne-shot of the Jefferson Memorial (in this one you can even see a part of the airplane or something else in the lower left corner), the Philadelphia skyline as they drive into Philadelphia, and the view from the "target location" of the shadow of the cross (near the brick containing the glasses) towards the steeple with the bell.

Continuity: When Ben is trying to pay cash for the 'replica' of the Declaration of Independence in the Gift Shop, he lays his wallet down on the counter and starts counting out bills and change right next to his wallet on the counter. A few scenes later, when the FBI is reviewing surveillance tapes, one of the monitors shows Ben reaching in his pocket, pulling out his wallet and grabbing the money that is out on the counter. This happens when the over voice says, "Charge. Benjamin Gates."