Continuity mistake: When Bond and Wai dive into the fountain to hide from the helicopter, clothes and pots appear/disappear randomly between shots.
Revealing mistake: In Saigon, when Bond pops a wheelie skid marks from previous takes can be seen on the road.
Revealing mistake: During the motorbike chase in Saigon, Pierce Brosnan's stunt is noticeable in many wide shots because of his hairstyle and receding hairline. (01:18:54)
Continuity mistake: At the car park, Bond disappears in all the wide shots of the car but reappears in the close-ups. This was due because the stunt driver was seated in the back seat.
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)
Factual error: At the start, when the two L-39 'Albatros' jet aircraft are approaching head-on towards each other on the runway, Bond throttles his engine to afterburner. The real L-39 is a subsonic aircraft and does not have an afterburner. (00:07:26)
Deliberate mistake: This mistake/trick was revealed in the second DVD commentary on the film. When Bond is underwater in the ship with the flare, this flare does not behave realistically. If they had used real flares, it would have put too much smoke and dirt in the water and quickly made it too murky to see or film through. So the flare used was a special effects prop of a bright light with bubbles being fed through it to give a good effect, but is not how a real flare would be under water. (01:08:25)
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: The scene where Carver is writing the newspaper headline, he changes it from "British sailors killed" to "British sailors murdered." The camera then cuts to a close up of his face, and reflected in his glasses we see the other page (with the headline in different languages). The top text box changes so it has two rows of text. However, when the camera cuts back as Stamper calls in, there is mysteriously only one line of text again.
Character mistake: Both the stealth boat captain and the British captain of the HMS Devonshire refer to the Chinese aircraft flying overhead as MiGs. However, the aircraft are in fact Nanchang Q-5s.
Revealing mistake: After Bond's BMW runs across the spikes that deflate the tyres, there follows a side shot of one of the rear tyres re-inflating. If you look carefully, under the car near the wheel is the mechanism they used to raise the car to 're-inflate' the tyre.
Factual error: In the Oxford scene, Bond is in bed with the Danish professor in the New Buildings wing of New College. The problem is that all the rooms in the New Buildings are student rooms and have always been so since they were built - no professors live or teach in this building. The professors are on the other side of college.
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: 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)
Factual error: In the first minutes of the movie, Bond is in an Albatross L-39 ZA, ejecting his enemy (in the back seat, who wants to strangulate him), not himself (in the front seat). Bond unlocks the ejection system with the switch on the console, but in reality ejection in that aircraft is triggered by a double firing handle on the seat pan.
Visible crew/equipment: When Bond and Lin are being chased on the bike in Ho Chi Minh City, before they have the final encounter with the helicopter. You see a few frames of the backside scaffolding of the city street set, constructed on the back lot of Pinewood Studios. (01:23:20)
Continuity mistake: Bond is fighting henchmen up on a moving platform at the newspaper. During the fight with the first guy, in several shots the platform isn't moving, then it is, then it isn't.
Continuity mistake: After Bond is done "meeting" with Paris, she puts her dress back on, including two straps for her shoulders. They disappear in the next shot, and never reappear.
Factual error: The scene during Carver's big speech in Hamburg. Bond is being beaten up by 3 German guys in a small room away from Carver. One of the guys throws bond through the glass window separating it from the next room alone. This glass is extra tough given that it is, according to one of the security guards, completely soundproofed. As Bond is thrown through the window, the glass shatters smoothly. If you watch, in a smooth rippling affect from top to bottom the glass falls away - it is evidently not glass here. Glass would not shatter in a neat line, and would leave shards in the window frame. (00:36:15)
Continuity mistake: When the BMW goes through the shop window there is a large hole in the back of the car with steam coming out of it indicating that a steam cannon was used to shoot the car off the roof of the car park (although a pre-production book claims that the hole is for mines, which weren't used during the chase anyway). Regardless, cut to the overhead shot and the hole is gone.
Chosen answer: According to the script, the other jet is hit by the two heat-seeking missiles it had previously fired, although that's not very clear in the film and it looks like it explodes when hit by the co-pilot.
Sierra1 ★