Skyfall may still be going strong after two months in the box office, but it’s actually the second most mistake-filled movie of 2012.
According to MovieMistakes.com, Skyfall has a record amount of 36 mistakes in the 143 minute runtime. It’s hard to believe that a movie grossing over $1 billion could get away with a few dozen mistakes, but maybe viewers were so captivated with action that they forgot to notice the huge continuity errors.
So, if you don’t believe me, take a look at the MovieMistakes.com compiled list below and make sure you have it handy when you re-watch this Bond film. It won’t be too hard to spot the flaws.
1. In the Commons Committee scene, when the CO2 extinguishers are shot, they slowly release their contents over a long period of time, giving a significant ‘smokescreen’. In fact, a shot which was able to penetrate the cylinder would cause a very quick release of gas, and the ‘smokescreen’ effect would be fairly limited.
2. The excavator Bond uses in the train chase scene is a Caterpillar 320DL, however Caterpillar builds all of their excavators with the cab on the left of the arm, not on the right as shown in the movie.
3. Mallory suggest to Q and Tanner that they lay the digital crumbs up the A9 as this is the most direct route. Glencoe is on the A82, not the A9, and in the next scene where the DB5 is entering Glencoe, it is the A82 shown.
4. In the opening car-driving scenes, Moneypenny is wearing her seatbelt, then she isn’t, then she is. The same is true of Bond. (We’ll let them slide and only count this as 1 mistake.)
5. In Istanbul, Bond goes to the mosque. When he approaches the mosque, the exterior shot is of the Sultan Ahmed mosque or “Blue Mosque.” When Bond is inside, the interior is actually of the much older, nearby, “Hagia Sophia” mosque.
6. When he is on the train being followed by the girl in the car he goes through a long tunnel, only for her to be waiting to shoot at the other side – surely a train going through a mountain must be quicker than a car driving round it.
7. When Bond drives his motorbike into the bridge, the scene changes to Bond landing on the train, the bike magically landing on its wheels upright, then when the scene changes again, the bike has disappeared, yet the bike should be seen rolling out of control.
8. Just before Bond reaches the Chapel, he plunges into icy water. In the next scene, in the Chapel, he is perfectly dry (my personal favorite continuity error).
9. In the scene where M (Judi Dench) is been driven back to the MI6 building, her car is stopped on a bridge and you see two cars stopping behind M’s vehicle while she is still inside. She then gets out of the vehicle to speak to a police officer who requested that the car stop, and now two different vehicles are behind.
10. In the bar with Bond drinking and watching television he reaches over for a bottle which is 80% full. He pours a small amount into his glass and watches the TV. In the next shot the bottle is only about 20% full (one of the biggest continuity errors in all of film).
11. In the car scene just before the MI6 explosion, invalid IPv4 addresses (with digits larger than 255) are displayed on the laptop screen.
12. The caterpillar digger on the train carriage would have been to large to fit through the tunnels later on in the train fight. Lucky it was decoupled or there’d have been a serious accident.
13. The VW beetles on the train are parked side-by-side. Cars are never loaded like this – they would be end-to-end to stop them overhanging the wagon and hitting passing objects. They’re only positioned like that to facilitate driving the digger over them later.
14. When there is a BBC News Report for the BBC News at 10 (clock bottom right) the wrong news studio is used rather than the correct one. They also used the wrong opening standing position. The studio shown is for the BBC News at 6pm, and the position used is only used for the intro after the half way segment, not the lead headline.
15. In the scene where M is asked to retire from MI6, she puts down her glass and gets up to leave. She picks up her coat from the back of the chair but leaves her bag on the floor. In the next shot, the bag is no longer there.
16. While talking with Severine in the casino bar, Bond gets his martini in a frozen glass. He picks it up, the camera’s point of view changes, and the glass is instantly completely unfrozen.
17. When on the motorbike on the rooftops of Istanbul, Bond at first has no sunglasses on, then sunglasses on, then no sunglasses.
18. In the chase through the tube station, Bond and Silva both slide down between the escalators. On the London Underground this area has hard vertical signs at regular intervals, precisely to prevent people sliding down.
19. At the end of the film, Bond is standing on the roof. The time seen on Big Ben is 5.55, and there’s loads of traffic in the background as well. He returns downstairs with Moneypenny and Tanner appears from M’s office saying “morning 007”. If it was morning in the winter months (Scotland having frozen lakes) it would be dark and not daylight that early.
20. In the scene where Bond is chasing Silva in the Underground, he leaps over the emergency buttons and slides down the escalator panel. Initially you can see the emergency buttons at the bottom of the escalator, which would have broken his slide, however, these “disappear” as Bond slides smoothly off the panel at the bottom.
21. When Bond is fighting on top of the train at the beginning of the film, his footwear changes from black lace up shoes to black slip-on ankle boots.
22. In the opening scene on the train the coupling is shot away and the rear wagon separates, this ruptures the continuous brake pipe, which would cause both halves of the train to stop immediately.
23. When M goes to see Mallory at the start of the film, he pours her a drink and places the bottle on the table with the label facing the camera. The label is off centre and more to the left – when M leaves the bottle has not been moved and the label is still facing the camera, but the label is now more to the right.
24. When Bond is drinking Macallan in M’s apartment he set the bottle down with the label facing away from us. Next shot has the bottle facing towards us. Final shot and the bottle is back in its original position, with the label away from us again.
25. James Bond is seen driving down Whitehall in London. Behind him a number 38 bus is seen. However the 38 does not travel down or indeed particularly near Whitehall. This was probably done to show off the new Routemaster bus, which is currently only used on the 38 route.
26. When Silva places the glass of whiskey on the girl’s head, the liquid is full to the brim in some shots, or a finger below in others.
27. As Bond chases Patrice over the rooftops of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul at the start of the film, in the close ups of Daniel Craig his tie can be seen noticeably flapping over his shoulder (as you would expect). But in the long shots with the stuntman it doesn’t move about at all, presumably having been fixed in place for safety.
28. When Bond confronts the assassin and lets him fall to his death from the building in Shanghai, he then looks over to the opposite window where Severine is standing in the smashed window hole, her hair blowing in the breeze. When it cuts to the closeup of her leaving you can see the light reflected in the window glass that has magically reappeared.
29. When Bond drives M away in the Jaguar XJ, police cars can be seen driving towards them when he speeds around the corner. The Volvo police car in front has two yellow dots on the top of the windscreen which mean armed response, but on the roof there is a circle, which means traffic/incident response. The aerial roof marking symbol should have been a five-edged star for armed response. Metropolitan police don’t even use Volvos for armed response. They use BMW 5 series and X5s.
30. The DB 5 drives from wet London to a wintery remote part of Scotland, and it’s totally clean. The wheels and the bodywork are spotless when they drive into the grounds of the house.
31. Bond and Silva travel from Temple station on the District/Circle line, which is a sub-surface line that has square tunnels (dug out from above and then covered over) and uses large trains with an almost square cross-section. However, the train they board is of the type used on the deep-level lines (eg. Northern and Jubilee lines), smaller and almost cylindrical in shape, and is seen to fit snugly into the cylindrical tube tunnel as the train leaves the station. They therefore can’t be travelling on the District/Circle line, and must be on a deep-level line instead. The disused Jubilee line platforms at Charing Cross are often used for filming, and photographs available online show one such platform recently dressed as Temple station.
32. In the opening chase scene 007 rides his bike against the wall of the bridge. The bike bounces back, but in the next shot it is catapulting over the wall, tumbling over and over.
33. In the scene where the assassin is about to go up in the elevator the 3rd button down on the right has been pressed and is lit. As the elevator closes the button is no longer lit.
34. M is called to a House of Commons Committee – Commons Committees are staffed by “backbenchers” (members of parliament not in government), but present here are a minister and a civil servant (Fiennes).
35. The pursuit scenes along the train tracks leading west from Istanbul show mountains and even trestles and tunnels which do not exist. The true scenery is quite boring.
36. In the Istanbul chase scene at the start of the movie, Eve knocks out the windshield of the car she’s driving, which comes out in more or less one solid piece. For the rest of the chase, about half the glass is suddenly back in the frame. Also, although she cracked the windshield all over to facilitate its removal, the leftover glass is later basically unbroken.
So, there you have it folks, a compiled list of 36 mistakes from MovieMistakes.com. I’m curious to see if this long list turns you off from watching Skyfall, or if you didn’t even notice the mistakes in the first place?