Factual error: The terrorist with the AK47 is unaware of the fact that a Harrier is hovering just outside the window until he slowly turns and see it there. He does a double take when he sees the Harrier just five metres away! A Harrier is an incredibly loud aircraft; you can hear them from three kilometers away. At that range the floor would shake with the noise and he would have been in no doubt whatever that he had been under attack for some time.
Factual error: When the bus is driving over the gap in the freeway, it jumps off at an angle. And when it lands, it lands close to perfection. If the bus landed at the same angle it jumped off on, the bus would either tip over or the 2 tyres would burst.
Factual error: A bunch of troops are in heavy camouflage in helicopters, going to an assignment. The officer in charge tells them to take their dog tags off and empty their pockets of anything that could identify them. This is silly: first, in troop helicopters, the troops wouldn't be able to hear the officer's voice - it's too noisy - and second, this would be ingrained in them, to remove dog tags etc, and would have been done back at the base, before they left.
Factual error: We're told they carbon dated the gold to determine its age. Problem is, the gold hasn't aged by the normal processs - as it's been brought forward in time it will appear to be extremely new. As such carbon dating wouldn't work. Also, carbon dating only works on things that were alive and absorbed carbon-14; gold, having never been alive, could not be dated this way.
Factual error: There is a shot with Wesley Snipes and Gary Busey aiming one another just to pull the triggers and discover that the guns are out of ammo. In fact, after the last shot (of the pistol, not the movie) the slide of a semi automatic pistol is retained open by the empty magazine, and doesn't return forward as we can see in the shot (of the movie, not the pistol). The reverse mistake is very common in movies, when the armorer loads just one round to be shot (in the movie as well as the gun) and the actor keeps fighting or menacing with an unloaded, breech opened gun.
Factual error: Near the end of the film, after Ditch and Krista use the reserve parachute, they fall in a windfarm. The windmills are spinning fairly slowly. After the fight Ditch pulls Pinkwater's parachute out. The wind pulls Pinkwater back towards the fan. Before he gets chopped up there is a shot of the fan blades spinning very fast and powerfully. A light breeze would not cause these blades to spin in this fashion. A hurricane would be needed for those blades to chop up a human.
Factual error: In the first scene, when Sylvester Stallone is in Colombia, the city that is named is Bogota. But that is impossible, Bogota is a metropolis of 7,000,000 people, one of the largest and most developed cities in South America, not a jungle.
Factual error: When Snowflake is being stolen at the beginning, he makes the high-pitched noise that dolphins make even when he is out of the tank; those high peals are made underwater through carrying sound. He wouldn't sound the same out of the water as he did under it.
Factual error: It is physically impossible to snow machine from the arctic circle area to Valdez in one day, as Steven Segal does.
Factual error: When Pauline makes her first entry into her 1953 diary, the date at the top of the page is January 1, Thursday. Later in the film when she begins her diary for 1954, the date on the page is January 1, Thursday. The same date in two consecutive years cannot be the same day of the week, they are a day apart (2 in a leap year). In actual fact, 1 January 1954 was a Friday. (00:24:20 - 01:03:45)
Factual error: When Mark and Reggie are fighting over whether or not to go to New Orleans, Mark starts walking toward the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge. There would be no need to cross that bridge as New Orleans is due south on Interstate 55. The Memphis-Arkansas Bridge is Interstate 40 and goes to Little Rock, AR or north to St. Louis.
Factual error: The grenade that the SWAT team fires in the hotel is supposedly a smoke bomb, but it is both marked ILUM and has a white body, meaning that it is an illumination grenade.
Factual error: When the red BMW hits the curb just before joining the freeway he does so at 70. Hitting the curb at 70 would cause a blowout. (00:17:10)
Factual error: In an early scene, when Axel Foley is pursuing the bad guys' truck, he is driving a red sports car that is gradually being shot to pieces around him by the bad guys. At one point, his airbag deploys, momentarily impeding his driving. This is a prop error: It was much smaller than a real airbag, it inflated much more slowly than the real thing, and it remained inflated till he mashed it down (real airbags pop and deflate within a second).
Factual error: A bottle of champagne in space rotates around its centre of mass, not the midpoint of its axis of symmetry.
Factual error: Near the end of the film, the movie changes locations to Seattle. A skyline is shown and it is identified as Seattle. The city skyline that is shown is actually Philadelphia.
Factual error: Dove runs towards the bomb truck to prevent his colleague from detonating the bomb, which he fails to do, then as the bomb explodes he falls towards it. The shock wave from the explosion would have pushed him backwards.
Factual error: "A Friend's" emails sent from the Univ. Of Washington look ridiculous with just some text and an abbreviated name on a colored background. UW emails have a white background, the addresses have a "uw.edu" domain name and show staff name, credentials, title, and department. The UW name, logo, and other info are always included. Prof. Friend's student assistant (son of Tom's co-worker) sent the emails from Friend's office, but he could have sent anonymous ones from any computer using Yahoo, Google, etc.
Factual error: When Dylan wakes up in the hospital, under a plastic tent, we hear the iconic "flat-lining" sound of a heart monitor. Dylan then removes the clamp from his finger and the sound stops. The clamp is an oximeter, a device that measures blood oxygen concentration. The wires going under his shirt are the heart monitor. The sound should not have stopped. (01:12:42)
Factual error: In the beginning of the movie, Dr. Bob Moore falls through the glass doors of his office and is impaled with the glass. This would never have happened. It is federal law that safety glass is used in all entry doors. The glass would have to have been made of tempered glass, which breaks into tiny pieces like a car window, or laminated glass which will crack and bend but stay intact like a car windshield, or of wire glass, which will act similar to laminated glass. None of these was used. A plain standard plate glass was used instead.