Factual error: When Bond crashes the snowmobile he ends up in a ditch to escape - he uses the front ski, but when he knocks the two soldiers over he is skiing uphill - no way to manage this from a standing start in a ditch. (00:03:07)
Factual error: May Day eludes Bond by executing a base jump from the top of the Eiffel tower. Bond then chases her for several minutes before she finally lands on the boat on the Seine river. The problem is that a base jumper from 300 metres (the height of the Eiffel tower) will only take about 30 seconds to reach the ground. Bond would not even have had the time to descend from the tower in the elevator before she would have landed. (00:18:30)
Factual error: While Stacy is driving her jeep across the bridge after leaving her workplace, she is listening to the smog report on the radio. The Bay Area does not have smog reports on the radio because they don't get smog (well, at least in 1985). (01:10:05)
Factual error: Zorin throws a 2 liter bottle of gasoline on the elevator in which Bond and Stacy are trapped. The fire from gasoline is nowhere near hot enough to melt a steel elevator cable. (01:26:30)
Factual error: Bond and Stacy jump across the 3rd street bridge in the firetruck in the dead of night. When they arrive at Main Strike Mine it is as if they have been driving for a long time. However it is clear that they are close to town - and San Andreas Lake is only 12 miles south of the 3rd street bridge. (01:34:00)
Factual error: There are no oil wells or oil fields anywhere in the Bay Area (Unlike Los Angeles, where there are oil wells everywhere). (01:41:05)
Factual error: When Zorin blows the explosives on the train in the mine tunnel, the tunnel collapses, letting the water from San Andreas Lake in. However that would not have generated a huge water column on the surface of the lake. That could only happen with a bomb in the water, not deep below the lake bed. (01:46:20)
Factual error: It would have been impossible for Zorin's airship to be inflated at the speed the film depicts. Nothing could inflate it that fast. (01:49:30)
Chosen answer: Zorin is a psychopath. He may have meant it when he told May Day he loved her, or he may have just been telling her what she wanted to hear. Either way, when he thinks she'll drown in the mine as well, he doesn't consider it worth scrapping the plan just to save her. Once she escapes and has the bomb, he looks shocked partially because she wasn't killed but mostly because she's chosen to sacrifice herself to thwart his plans, something that a self-interested psychotic personality can't comprehend.
Captain Defenestrator