Continuity mistake: There is a shot from behind a video camera, showing a wire or cable coming out of the back of the video camera, however, in all subsequent shots the wire/cable is not present. (00:00:50)
Continuity mistake: Near the beginning when Bond causes mayhem, he sticks a grenade onto a moving vehicle and dives off it. As he jumps off and attacks a bad guy his collar is up (to better hide the face of the stuntman), then when it cuts back to a proper shot of him his collar's suddenly down. (00:04:50)
Continuity mistake: When Bond knocks out the MiG's copilot with the helmet, in the shot from behind the pilot (where Bond is quite obviously Pierce Brosnan) he is seen with a Beretta 92FS. However in the shot from behind Bond (now stuntman Wayne Michaels), the gun the copilot drops is now a Browning BDA. (00:05:30)
Continuity mistake: In the pre-credits plane chase scene the aircraft behind Bond's fires two missiles. Bond avoids the missiles and they strike the side of the mountain, exploding in a huge ball of flame and smoke. The pilot chasing Bond pulls up quickly, almost crashing into the mountain and passing through the cloud of smoke from the missiles. The camera angle cuts immediately to an overhead shot and it is completely clear around the jet; the smoke cloud from the missiles has disappeared. (00:08:35)
Continuity mistake: Carver is typing headlines for a story on the deaths of the British soldiers. In one shot, he types "killed" onto the large screen. In the immediately following shot, a reflection in his glasses shows the same word being typed again. (00:18:25)
Continuity mistake: When Bond is in bed with the translator just after the title sequence, the position of the sheet of her back changes between shots. Note the gap between James' hand and the sheet. (00:21:40)
Continuity mistake: James and M are travelling in the motorcade. The privacy barrier is lowered to reveal that Moneypenny is in the front-passenger seat. The shot changes to an exterior shot of the limousine. You can clearly see the privacy divider rising during this shot. The shot returns to the interior of the limousine for more dialog. Then the shot returns to Moneypenny for her to say that James will have to decide how much "Pumping" is required. Once again you can see the privacy divider rise. (00:26:59)
Continuity mistake: Bond is led into the soundproof room and the one guard closes the door. Bond is then hit, and we see the door close again. (00:36:10)
Continuity mistake: In the car chase in Hamburg, when Bond is in the back seat remotely driving the car, the car does a U-turn into another lane. After the car says "Reduce speed - pedestrians in roadway" there is a shot of the car's dashboard from inside the car, with the car travelling straight forward. The steering wheel, however, is tilted to the right, even though 1) The car is travelling straight and 2) The car had just made a LEFT turn. (00:57:30)
Continuity mistake: When Carver has Bond and Wai Lin in his new building after capture, he is writing their obituaries as he narrates it. The camera zooms slowly closer to Bond and Lin before cutting to a close up of Lin. Suddenly, her mouth is shut when it was partly open before, and her hair is in a slightly different position. (01:13:34)
Continuity mistake: In the shower scene, when the handcuffs are placed around the pipe, we hear them ratchet closed, but when Wai-Lin walks away, the handcuffs are actually fully open, around the pipe, and not closed. Then they're closed and James Bond has to pull the pipe from the wall to release himself from it. (01:25:12)
Continuity mistake: When on the Stealth ship, Bond uses a fixed rocket launcher using controls on the left side of it, then he turns it to aim elsewhere and he's instantly on the right side. Possible flipping of the image? Also when he turns it, you can see there's an empty rocket tube next to him but in the couple of frames before it launches, all rockets are in their tubes. (01:41:10)
Continuity mistake: In Bond's hotel room, after Dr. Kauffman has killed Carver's wife, he takes out the tape that has been playing, holds it up, and it's fully rewound.
Continuity mistake: Gupta, Carver's gadget man, proves that Paris, Carver's wife, knows Bond extremely well by showing Carver some secret footage taken at the cable TV launch party. In that footage, Paris says to Bond, "Tell me James, do you still sleep with a gun under your pillow?" As she asks him this question, Bond can be seen looking down over the railing at the crowd below. Yet if you rewind a few minutes to the actual moment in the movie when she asks him this question, Bond is not looking down, he is, in fact, regarding her fixedly. They clearly reshot it (even her intonation of the question is different).
Continuity mistake: When James has just jumped out of the plane, he has a diving rig that is somewhat different to the one he has when diving on the wreck of the Devonshire. In the water, he wears a twinset manifold air-bottle rig. While skydiving, the rig was not manifolded, and the bottles were in a different position on his back. To change between the two requires some work with a toolkit, preferably on dry land.
Continuity mistake: The scene where there is a car chase with the very nicely equipped BMW, you could clearly see before the chase that the car was equipped with, I believe, five-star rims. But in the scene, it shows the back left tires having hubcaps instead of the five-star rims.
Continuity mistake: As Bond is driving his BMW by remote control from the back seat, the bad guys shoot out the windshield with several machine guns and at least one rocket launcher. The damage to the interior of the BMW is substantial - most notably, the bullet holes in the headrests in the rear seat. However, in a couple of subsequent shots, the headrests are clean and undamaged, only to have the bullet holes suddenly re-appear in the following shots.
Continuity mistake: When the stealth ship tries to escape the English and Chinese navies, they say it's going 48 knots. But when we see it 'speeding' away, you can see by its wake that it is cruising very slowly. Definitely nowhere near 48 knots.
Continuity mistake: In the BMW chase scene the back window is clearly blown out, however as the camera goes back on Bond it is intact, and then missing as the rocket launcher goes cleanly through moments later.
Continuity mistake: When Bond and Wei Lin are hanging from the poster halfway up Carver's Saigon skyscraper, they break a window to get back inside. In the first shot, before they even swing at it, there's a big white crack in it. In subsequent shots, the crack disappears and then reappears.
Answer: It's getting dark by this point - Bond and Wai Lin are dressed in black in a dark coloured boat. Anyone looking out of the window would be looking down towards them - they wouldn't be able to pick them out against the sea.
Tailkinker ★