Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - 69 mistakes

Factual error: In the scene where Galloway parachutes out of a C-17, Major Lennox asks Galloway if he is "familiar with the standard MC-4" parachute as he is helping Galloway don said parachute. The parachute that actually deploys when Galloway pulls the ripcord is not an MC-4, as MC-4 parachutes have rectangular canopies (shown correctly later in the film as the NEST team descends into the desert).

Audio problem: At the beginning, after Bumblebee blows up the house, when Sam tells him to get in the garage, his mouth doesn't move.

Continuity: When Major Lennox throws Galloway off the cargo plane, Optimus Prime's dead body disappears.

Factual error: In the opening scene, humans with hunting tools find Transformers building the Sun Harvester amid mountains so high they are covered in snow. This is to be the site of the Great Pyramids, and within some thousands (thousands, not millions) of years, the mountains have completely eroded down to sand dunes. Someone corrected this, saying:[Perhaps the machine was moved. The Primes (in the backstory scenes) bury themselves into mountains soon after stealing back the matrix. Those same mountains we see the machine was surrounded by at the start of the movie. The mountains have not changed where the Primes are buried. Therefore it is a safe assumption that the machine was moved and concealed by the pyramids.] Since this is an assumption, it is also safe to assume that there would be no reasonable need to relocate the Sun Harvester without the Matrix, as the Matrix is required for the machine to work.

Continuity: In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Seymour Simmons (John Turturro) calls in coordinates of the Daggers Tip from a pay phone. He says the coordinates are 29.5 North by 34.88 East. Later, when a young soldier shows General Morshower a note containing the coordinates from Major Lennox, the paper says 29.5 North by 35.88 East. A difference of one degree of latitude would translate into about a 69 mile error.

Continuity: During the scene establishing the Decepticons on the Bayos freight ship, vehicles change. The first shot, overhead, shows Long Haul (green dump truck), MixMaster (grey cement truck), Rampage (red bulldozer), and Scrapper (yellow front loader with wheels). The next shot shows Rampage as being yellow, and Scrapper is now some yellow Volvo vehicle with treads and a claw. Also, by the angle of this shot and based on the previous shot, there would not be an angle to see through the background vehicles. In the next shot, when the transformers jump overboard, Rampage is red again, and the Volvo with treads is now the front loader Scrapper again.

Continuity: In two different places in the film, the exact same shot of Soundwave communicating with the Decepticons in space is used. Someone corrected, saying: [Not sure how this is a movie mistake. Soundwave is in Space functioning as a satellite. As such, would not be required to move around much. Both shots align with and fits within the plot and flow of the movie.] If a human character in any movie was shown at two different times making the exact same movements, with the camera shot being exactly the same, it would be noted by observers as a major oversight at least, if not an intentional shortcut by a really bad director.

Continuity: When Sam asks Skids and Mudflap if they can read the Cybertronian symbols, his hand moves from pointing at the tattoo on his arm to his head.

Visible crew/equipment: At the scene where Optimus Prime's body is getting back to base and suddenly got surrounded by US marines, after the shot where Major Lennox objects and beats on the hood of a Humvee, you can see cameraman's shadow on him in a panning shot. Some shots later you can see it again on Galloway's body in an over-shoulder view.

Revealing: In the scene where Major Lennox is being sustained by the Galloway and Master Sergeant Epps says that he's an "Asssshole!", you can see bunch of soldiers and Autobots in the shot. Sunlight is almost in the middle of the shot; the problem is just the body of the soldiers blocks it. If you watch it closely you can see first a soldier with hat blocks sunlight, after that an Autobot should block it but it doesn't. Again a soldier comes from left to right and blocks it and after that an Autobot should have blocked it, but still you can see the sunlight.

Continuity: When Sam is at the Frat party just after he has written the code on the table with cake, he goes and gets a drink. The glass is full, the camera cuts to the girl talking and then cuts back to Sam and the glass is nearly empty, cuts to the girl again and then back to Sam, with a full glass again.

Factual error: The team go to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, which is located adjacent to Dulles Airport in Virginia - surrounded by rolling green hills - to find a Transformer. When Jetfire breaks out of the museum, beyond the broken door is a large, desert airplane graveyard with large mountains in the background. This appears to be the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (309 AMARG), a well known aircraft 'boneyard', located at Davis-Monthan AFB, in Arizona.

Plot hole: Simmons stands outside the 'The Monastery' at Petra (not to be confused with 'The Al Kazneh' at Petra where Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed) and looks at the horizon, and he is able to see the Air Force landing with Optimus by the pyramids. It then appears to take them mere minutes to drive over there. This is outright laughable, even accepting that they make the trip in an alien robot car. Petra and Cairo are separated by hundreds of miles of desert, not to mention Israel being between Egypt and Jordan.

Revealing: When Sam is brought to the cemetery to meet Optimus, you can see the green mark on the grass where Sam is supposed to stand while talking to him. (This can also be seen in one of the trailers, 48 seconds in).

Revealing: When the group are outside talking to Jetfire in the aircraft 'boneyard', on the ground in the bottom right of the screen you can see the tyre tracks where the 3 cars are supposed to pull up to join the shot - then the car on the far right stops and pulls forward again till it's at the end of the tyre track.

Continuity: When Sam is supposedly dead, it shows him walking into a bright light while talking to Autobots. It shows Sam's pinky and ring finger wrapped up in a bandage, but a couple of seconds later the bandage has changed to wrapping Sam's middle and ring fingers.

Revealing: As the two main characters are running down the sand dune, you can see the darker sand of the previous takes where the director has raked down the sand so as not to show the foot marks in it.

Factual error: In the battle between Decepticons and Autobots, the battle is around a Jordanian temple. Supposedly it's Petra temple, with the Egyptian pyramids only couple of miles away. In fact, the distance between the two monuments is more than 250 miles.

Continuity: When Mikaela runs into the lamppost, while running away from Pretender, when they enter it doesn't have headrests on the seats, but when they kill the Pretender and are driving away, the headrests are there.

Continuity: While Mikaela and Sam are running through Egypt, they both take off their jackets. Sam drops his jacket, but in the next shot it's in his hand again.

Revealing: Near the end, there's a slow motion shot of Sam and Mikaela running with explosions behind them. If you look at Mikaela closely, some fire goes right through her (this was added in post-production and they didn't rotoscope her properly).

Continuity: The multiple shots of the sinking Aircraft carrier are primarily shots of the CVN 74 (USS John C. Stennis) but also have shots of the CVN 72 (USS Abraham Lincoln) and the CVN 71 (USS Theodore Roosevelt). It is reported later on the news as the Roosevelt, and the Stennis is seen towards the end of the movie perfectly fine and providing air support.

Continuity: In the astronomy class, Sam writes many symbols on the chalk board. In the first shot of the full board, one symbol is very messy. In a later shot, it is significantly cleaned up.

Continuity: Just after Jetfire sacrifices himself, Ratchet orders Jolt to electrify, and we see Sam and Mikaela standing near Ratchet, but in the next shot when the Transformer's parts are flying towards Optimus, Sam is now a couple of feet away helping Mikaela stand up again.

Continuity: When Sam, Michaela and Leo enter the deli, the clock says 11:40 am. However, a few seconds later, the clock shows the time as being 1:00 pm.

Visible crew/equipment: Near the end, when the Devastator is being transformed from the cement mixer, crane, bulldozer etc., the cement mixer with the Decepitcons' emblem stops abruptly and the stunt driver can be seen being thrown back into his seat.

Continuity: In the basement of the deli, Sam holds two photos of Seekers, one in each hand. The image of the car and plane switch hands and back again in different shots.

Other: In the deli's basement, Wheelie shows places on a map of America where Seekers are hiding. Agent Simmons states that the closest is in Washington D.C., but the closest marked on the map is in the middle of New Jersey, near Philadelphia.

Continuity: When Alice is kissing Sam on the bed there is a fan framed in the window next to the Bad Boys poster. It is there when she grabs him with her 'tongue'. When Mikaela returns, she throws the box and it just breaks glass in that window frame. When Alice sits up to transform, the fan is sitting on the bed leaning against the Bad Boys poster.

Continuity: Near the beginning when they're in China, the NEST team is moving on a Decepticon reading and it should be right in front of them.There's an overhead shot and a shot looking into the concrete tubes to where the very large Decepticon is, but you can't see its vehicle form at all until it starts transforming and attacking the troops.

Continuity: During the shot where Mikaela runs into the lamp post, both the Pretender and the front bumper slide under the car as she backs up and drives forward again. Seconds later, as the camera angle changes and they drive away, the front bumper is re-attached with only a dent where it hit the post.

Visible crew/equipment: During one of the circling shots in which Sam says goodbye to Mikaela before going to college, it is possible to see the shadow of a cameraman in Sam's red shirt.

Continuity: When Megatron heads toward the tower in jet mode, he transforms and seen upside-down on his back flipping towards the tower before he lands. About a split second when he lands, he faces the other way instead of facing the tower.

Visible crew/equipment: After escaping from Megatron, Sam and company go to a deserted junkyard. When Sam is leaning on the hood and Bumblebee drives forward and flashes his lights, a crew man can be seen in the driver's seat. This has been repeatedly corrected, wrongly, by the excuse that a few Transformers have been seen to create holographic drivers or pilots. This is not inaccurate, but cannot be plausibly applied to this case. (1) Bumblebee has never been seen to do this; in fact, no car-form Autobot has been shown to possess this ability, even in situations where it would seem sensible to do so. (2) There is nobody present who is unaware of Bumblebee's true nature, therefore he would have no reason to suddenly project one. (3) In the shots either side of this, no hologram is present. For the corrections to apply, we would have to accept that Bumblebee, for a matter of a few seconds, chose to display an ability that he's never shown to possess at any other time, in a situation where he has no reason to do so. Clearly this is not a supportable argument. This is a visible crew member and a valid mistake.

Other: During final battle after Optimus' resurrection, the battle scene moves from the pyramids (located near Cairo) to the Karnak temple (located near Luxor, more than 1000km from Cairo) and back.

Factual error: Right after the title the location moves to Shanghai, China and you see a train of a few oxide-red hoppers. One of them is lettered for the Missouri Pacific railroad, with the Mo-Pac eagle logo visible. Another hopper is lettered for Conrail. These American train cars would not be in China.

Factual error: At the end of the movie where the action takes place on top of the Pyramid of Khafre (the big one in the middle), this same pyramid can be seen in the background. It is the same pyramid as this is the only one with limestone casing covering the top 1/3 of the pyramid.

Continuity: In the movie's finale, when Mikaela and Sam are being pursued in Egypt, Mikaela's trousers are perfectly white after crawling in dust and getting dirty.

Factual error: Towards the end of the movie we see the U.S. military deploy several troops to Egypt; however, one scene has LCACs landing 2 M1A1 Abrams, so obviously they are Marines. But later we see that they become M1A2s which are only in service with the Army, not Marines. And it only shows 2 landing but later there are several M1s and M2s (along with a M270). Also when the tanks are landing we see 2 AH-1 Supercobras but they mysteriously disappear after that scene.

Factual error: When Starscream and Megatron are shown talking after Sam has escaped, they are supposed to be in New York City. They are actually on top of the "Gas Company Tower" which is in Los Angeles.

Factual error: During the Decepticon attack on Paris, there is a shot of the Hotel Crillon with the Eiffel Tower in the background. The tower is actually on the opposite side of Paris, making this shot impossible.

Factual error: When the Decepticons are reviving Megatron, General Morshower states something like "coming up from 9,000 fathoms". 9,000 fathoms is approximately 16,000 meters. The Laurentian Abyss, where Megatron was supposedly dropped, is around 6,000 meters deep.

Continuity: In one scene we're shown a Predator B UAV taking off. This is a shot of an actual Predator B, which is a pusher turboprop. In a later scene we come back to the Predator, now on site, in a CG shot. The CG model is some kind of mutant Predator with a turbojet - no prop at all. This is the same mutant CG model used in TF1, but here it is a continuity error with the real shots.

Continuity: During the forest scene where Optimus Prime is engaged in a battle to the death, Sam is scrambling for safety. In most of the shots, both of his hands are uninjured, but there is one shot where you can see that his left hand is bandaged/splinted. (This is a result of his "real life" injury in a car accident during filming.).

Visible crew/equipment: As the nest team roll out of the back of the truck in China, you can see a guide wire attached to the front of the quad/three wheeler thing.

Continuity: After Optimus Prime dies, there is a shot of Soundwave saying "Decepticons, mobilize". In this shot, you can see that Soundwave is not connected to the military satellite, when he is in a later scene.

Revealing: During one of the shots in which the Pyramid of Giza gets destroyed, one of the falling rocks does not spin. During the fall, the rock bounces without spinning when touching the surface of the pyramid. It seems just to "hover" down.

Continuity: When The Fallen decrees that the Decepticons will now make their presence known, one of them knocks the flagpole off the top of the eastern tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. A short time later, another shot of the tower shows the flagpole is back and there is no damage.

Continuity: When Mikaela is talking to Sam on the phone after Sam had his "nervous breakdown", when he is picking up the dropped papers, the people on the right coming down the stairs come down twice.

Factual error: When Jetfire uses the "space bridge" to instantaneously move the characters from Washington, D.C. to the Middle East (on the other side of the planet), it was still daylight. 7:30 p.m. (summer closing hours at the museum) in D.C. is 2:30am where they arrived, but it was still broad daylight.

Factual error: In the opening of the Shanghai scene, there's a helicopter in the scene of the transformers fight. The helicopter has words on it meaning "police" in Chinese. But Shanghai use "Gong An," not the "Jing Tsa" seen here. Both of them mean police, but different words are used in China than in other Asia countries.

Continuity: When Sam, Mikaela and Leo are running from Alice outside the library, Mikaela's shoes are in her hand when running down the stairs, but in the following shot her shoes are back on her feet.

Revealing: In one of the first scenes with Devastator 'inhaling' everything in sight, there is an SFX shot of some random bystander hanging on for dear life, then losing his grip and being sucked in. During this shot you can see the matte halo around the person as they flail and 'fall'. It is especially noticeable given the general high quality of the effects in the film: by contrast this looks like a cheap effects shot from an old movie.

Factual error: The F-16s performing close air support were loaded with orange-colored "captive carry" munitions. These are used for maintaining weight balance on the wings, and are not weapons.

Continuity: While we're repeatedly shown map views of the region while events are taking place in Jordan and Egypt, and characters even say things like they're "five klicks" (kilometers) from the water during the battle, things cover distance impossibly fast. For example, we're shown M-1 Abrams tanks being landed ashore by LCACs (Landing Craft Air Cushion), but just seconds later they're on site, engaging the Decepticons. This does not appear to be a time-lapse in the film itself, as we're shown the battle unfolding in what appears to be real-time. And that's ignoring that the pyramids, around which the battle is taking place, are really roughly 140 kilometers from the tip of the water. Even the closest point is around 120km from the water to pyramids.

Factual error: Scene of the submarine USS Topeka (SSN-754) shows an older version of the 688 class submarine. The Topeka does not have the planes shown above the surface, instead it has bow planes that would have been under the waterline.

Factual error: The British flag at NEST headquarters is upside down.

Factual error: Orion's Belt (a.k.a. "The 3 Kings") is supposed to point to the Tomb of the Primes, and Jetfire had been searching for ages for it. Because of Earth's rotation on an axis, the stars never appear in the exact same place, even over the course of one night. The only one that doesn't shift is Polaris and that's why it's called the "North Star". Also after thousands and thousands of years, the stars will completely change positions (even Polaris).

Audio problem: Near the end of the film, in the desert, Agent Simmons begins saying, "One man! Alone! Betrayed." You can see in the silhouetted shot of him sitting in the car that his lips are moving totally out of sync with the audio.

Other: When Mikaela is airbrushing the motorcycle, if you look in the bowl (where the paint goes) there is no indication of any paint.

Continuity: In Egypt, after Sgt. Epps mentions that the jets will target the orange smoke, you see everyone running away from the smoke in slow motion. Sam is holding the sock with the disintegrated Matrix in his left hand. In different shots as he is running away, the sock switches to his to right hand and then back to his left hand.

Other: In one of the beginning scenes, the time at the bottom says that it is 22:00, which means it would be 10pm in China. In the scene, it is bright daylight, not night time as it should be.

Character mistake: In the original Transformers, the final battle takes place in a fictional city known as Mission City, which according to Lennox is 22 miles away from the Hoover Dam, putting it close to Las Vegas. However, when Sam is in his dorm room, it's stated that the battle was in LA.

Continuity: During the battle in Egypt there are F-16s attacking the Decepticons. This is made very clear by repeated shots of the F-16s, and characters saying things like "I hope those F-16s are accurate." Just after the 'F-16 strike' we jump to another shot of two characters, and behind them you can see two jets pulling up and banking away, apparently just having made the strike. One of them is an A-10 Warthog, not an F-16 Fighting Falcon.

Factual error: The Autobots/N.E.S.T. base is said to be on Diego Garcia, a real military base in the Indian Ocean. The island in the movie is not D.G. The movie version appears to have hills and sparse vegetation, the real island's a tropical climate, and the highest point is about 22ft above sea level.

Factual error: Mikaela hotwires the silver Saturn Astra at the attack at the university. Firstly, she doesn't break the physical steering lock, and secondly, this is impossible to hotwire. It requires a signal from a chip in the ignition key that transmits the signal to the ECU to enable the car to start.

Continuity: In the scene where Sam and Mikaela are running away from the Decepticons after being captured, you see Bumblebee with Sam already in the car with his arm hanging out the window. Next scene, you see him running to Bumblebee and opening the driver's side door. As Bumblebee drives off, you see Sam's arm hanging out again.

Factual error: When the Decepticons are reviving Megatron in the Laurentian Abyss, sunlight can be seen filtering down on them. The Laurentian Abyss is too deep for sunlight to penetrate.

Continuity: When the Decepticons go to revive Megatron, five go down to get him. When they start to revive him they tear one apart for spare parts. On the way back up though, the submarine states six bogeys returning. The little Decepticon who emerges is far too small to show up on sonar - if the Navy picked him up they'd be picking up every tiny bit of ocean junk.