Deliberate mistake: After Doug finds where Minuti was killed and set on fire, he walks over to a dock where he sees Minuti's arm being eaten by alligators. Minuti had been dumped in the water 4 days prior, yet his hand is perfectly intact with no signs of burning, bite marks or weather/water damage of any kind.
Deliberate mistake: O'Niel needs a sample of a dead man's blood to test for toxic drugs. So he visits the corpse, which has been dead for quite some time and is lying on its back, and proceeds to insert a hypodermic syringe into the dead man's frontal neck, extracting the sample. But blood pools low in the body soon after death. There ought to have been no blood available from that location of the body. To get blood, O'Niel should've punctured the corpse's underside.
Deliberate mistake: The elevator operated by gremlins starts ascending at around 5 stories per second, based on the floor readings. Yet when the elevator suddenly stops dead, Kate does not fly into the air caused by the huge speed change. (00:50:05)
Deliberate mistake: When Adam kills himself and Hector at the end, the explosion sends a lot of water and parts of Hector into the air. But there is no sign of Adam's blood, body parts or clothing, despite the fact that the bomb was strapped to him. (01:16:10)
Deliberate mistake: During the space battle, one of Drax's men gets his back pack blasted. (1:46:37) His entire pack explodes so that his jet pack and life support are destroyed. But as a result of that blast, all the parts from his suit FALL DOWN! Even though there's no gravity.
Deliberate mistake: After Mina leaves the car in Venice, Sawyer just manages to avoid several obstacles on the way, including a bend in the canal. But in the first scene, where Sawyer swerves the car around, its front should have slipped into the water anyway, considering the speed of the car and the tightness of the street, which makes a sharp L-turn at such close quarters next to impossible. But then the scene jump-cuts, and the car is well past the hazard.
Deliberate mistake: When the woman is attempting to escape from the elevator, it dislodges and falls down, so then the actress is facing the ground...but when her arm hits the floor, the floor itself bends. If you watch the DVD with the commentary on, the director points out that it was a break away floor in case the actress' head accidentally snapped forward, to avoid any injury. (00:08:00)
Deliberate mistake: On the map showing the location of all the 'Camel Hump' refuelling blimps, none of them are anywhere near the countries EDI visits in the film - the nearest one is more than a thousand miles away over the Pacific.
Deliberate mistake: The Army Colonel's Class A uniform does not have a name plate on the flap of the right breast pocket as per regulations. If the Colonel's name plate was present, there would be no twist to the movie. (01:21:50)
Deliberate mistake: The explosion of the ship at the end of the film is actually another angle of the explosion of the house from a few seconds earlier. The craft's explosion is much too small for what is shown in the film.
Deliberate mistake: When the raptor breaks into the control room and is hopping around the computer workstations, we see sharp, distinct genetic coding projected from a computer screen and across the raptor's face (starting 1:55:50). Aside from the fact that computer displays have never projected focused images onto nearby surfaces, the projected text shown in this scene oddly reads from left-to-right, when it should actually be a flipped mirror-image (right-to-left). Spielberg probably realised this factual incongruity while filming but chose to use the left-to-right text for the sake of audience recognition, given that the multiple lines of "GATC" genetic code were already confusing enough. (01:55:50)
Deliberate mistake: When 11 is dropped into the water and eaten by the piranhas, although the ravenous fish probably ate most of her and what was on her, there should at least be pieces of clothing that would rise to the surface in the flurry of activity. Not to mention that even though the water is a murky green all the blood from her body should have created a temporary, but very noticeable darkening of the water.
Deliberate mistake: The theatre is said to have been closed down "years ago". But all the theater props are still there, and the place shows no sign of disuse, it is not even dusty anywhere. The electricity and water are also still hooked up and functioning.
Deliberate mistake: When Alice jumps from the rooftop, the entire roof explodes, but the wire she is on is still intact. (01:00:50)
Deliberate mistake: In real life, the Brazilian natives do not wear clothes at all except for speedo type shorts, even the women. This is a deliberate error to keep the film "clean."
Deliberate mistake: Before the two shuttles dock to the MIR station, Lev initiates a rotation to simulate gravity. The shuttles then dock with their side hatch pointing to the anchorage. As the gravity is pointing away from the centre of revolution and the station is revolving around its main corridor, the gravity would push the astronauts back in to the shuttle and not towards the floor of the gangways leading to the shuttle or towards the floor of the shuttle. Also, the artificial gravity would be reduced to almost nothing at the main corridor. But here the artificial gravity somehow points down in every part of the station, and appears to work equally well throughout the station. (01:09:40)
Deliberate mistake: The aliens fire on a bell tower with a clock on it. In the next shot a different building blows up. (01:17:15)
Deliberate mistake: A shot that lasts three seconds is backwards. The previous shot is a point of view outside an elevator and it shows Maria descending into the workers' city. The very next shot is a point of view from inside the same elevator and it shows the elevator ascending out of the workers' city. (Observed in both the Kino and Madacy DVD's. The timecode is for the Kino DVD.) (01:32:25)
Deliberate mistake: After being arrested, Breaker, who is Northern African, a region where French is the second if not first native language and speaks with a French accent throughout the movie, pleads with the French authorities in English. (01:10:30)
Deliberate mistake: When Cliff crashes into the pond after his first flight, Peevy tells him that he has to look around with his eyes and steer by moving his head. However, just before this as he is flying next to the passenger airplane, he looks over at it, turning his head to the left without changing directions at all.