Continuity mistake: When young Mulan is chasing the chicken, a man walking down the stairs is suddenly several steps behind, repeating all previous movements. (00:01:57)
Continuity mistake: When Mulan steps on the winged sculpture the ramp next to the steps is clean, a shot later it's dirty and with mud all over. (00:02:00)
Audio problem: Mulan slips on the roof and tiles fall. No crash or any sound whatsoever is heard. (00:02:52)
Continuity mistake: After slipping down the roof, Mulan smiles at her father and bends her arm. From the opposite angle the arm is lowered. (00:03:00)
Continuity mistake: When Mulan's mom and dad talk, the cloth on the table changes positions and shape between shots. (00:04:22)
Continuity mistake: When Xianniang chokes Bòˆri Khan the position of her fingers changes between shots. Note how the index finger is separated from the rest in one shot, or close to the others a shot later. (00:12:29)
Continuity mistake: When Mulan moves the teapot to trap the spider, the teapot is at different distance from the tablecloth depending on the camera angle. (00:17:20)
Continuity mistake: Mulan is having dinner with her family after her father has been drafted. During the scene depending on the camera angle her arms are folded, or her right arm is leaning against the table while she is holding chopsticks in midair. (00:20:55)
Continuity mistake: On the way to the conscription office, Cricket introduces himself, or tries to do so, but the token bully starts tormenting him by prodding his ear with a small straw. The straw has split ends which make noticeable the fact that the straw is turned at a different angle between shots; the second time he gets poked in particular, the smoother end is floppy and tilted downwards in the wide angle, straight and horizontal in the ear close-up. (00:29:25)
Continuity mistake: Chen Honghui extends his hand to "the little man" to help 'him' back on his feet, but Mulan pulls her sword on him. The sword strap dangles freely in the shots by the side, but it is held up in the close-ups of the blade pointed at his neck. (00:29:45)
Continuity mistake: The commanding officer (Donnie Yen) intervenes to stop the sword-pointing nonsense with his kung-fu badassery. He easily disarms the two litigious rookies and holds both their swords, but the pose he strikes is a different one in the two shots; Mulan's family heirloom is held alternatively low and high. (00:29:55)
Continuity mistake: Once Mulan has reached the top of the mountain with her buckets, the action moves to the Rouran troops assaulting a city. Gong Li's witch is womanhandling a bunch of soldiers who try to impale her. She grabs a spear a few inches away from its feathers, but in the next shots her hand is covered by them. (00:50:50)
Continuity mistake: After the first clash with the Witch, as the narration says Hua Jun 'dies', but Mulan lives. The close-up on the blade shows a hand gripping it a couple inches below the blade, while whenever we see her face, before and after that close-up, she is holding it with her finger alongside the guard. (01:03:45)
Continuity mistake: Mulan opens her armor to extract the throwing weapon blocked by her makeshift corset. In the first close-up the long strand of hair that was in front of her left hand is gone, and in the second one (when she pulls the weapon out) her left hand is holding the armor below the dagger - it was above it before. (01:04:25)
Continuity mistake: Mulan sheds her armor and is back to the battlefield, where she begins mowing down the bunch of Rourans. When she impales her last one, look at the shot when Yifei Liu is barely in frame; you can tell that there's just a tiny portion of her by her eye, but when the camera is focused in the next shot on the cool pose that sends everyone else hightailing, there's a lot of hair down that side of her face. (01:06:25)
Continuity mistake: When Mulan watches the flying burning catapult balls her hair is behind her shoulders. In the close-up it's over her shoulders. (01:08:51)
Factual error: Not only Mulan's horse is able to outrun an avalanche (at the beginning even unseen by the large enemy army who does not even notice the event occurring), but it also gallops through it undisturbed while Honghui is being carried away depicted as being in serious danger. (01:09:30)
Suggested correction: This is consistent with what you see throughout the whole film: Mulan consistently breaks the laws of physics because her "Chi" is strong. (Translating it to the Star Wars lingo: Strong with her The Force is.) Five minutes before (video time, not in-film time) she reversed the flight direction of a spear. This is a fantasy film and is supposed to do all of this; we watch it knowing that magic, "Chi", and The Force are not real.
That's a composition fallacy.
Continuity mistake: When Mulan is back home and her mother hugs her, in the first shot her hand is on Mulan's shoulder, on the top, but after the cut it's behind it. (01:40:35)
Plot hole: There is no reason at all why, being targeted by a few arrows by unseen enemies - a fire suppressed already by the salvo of their own archers - the Rourans would turn around their heavy siege equipment, away from the bulk of the enemy forces, and fire it, hurling a single heavy stone to the middle of nowhere when they have the whole rest of the army who could storm the rock the supposed enemy commandos hide behind, or the archers who could keep shooting - again, they proved to be completely successful. It also makes no sense that the all-powerful witch who made the warriors flee managed to do any of this, 'sneaking' by horse in the middle of the steppe.
Suggested correction: Mulan used the helmets of the fallen warriors to make it appear that a large force has flanked Rourans. Rourans didn't expect this new "force" and knew nothing about it. They didn't know its size. And while their original target seemed harmless, this new "force" was killing Rourans. Fear and death were the reasons. What you see in this scene is an enactment of one of Sun Tzu's famous quotes: "All warfare is based on deception. [...] Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected."
What we see in the scene is laughable, and not because of the idea, which surely is based on the profound strategic motto you mentioned and we find in many folkloric tales in other cultures as well; what we actually see in the movie, is that she grabbed a couple helmets lining them up on a rock, and she shot a few arrows. Then she stops shooting, and we see helmets knocked down in their full view. The movie truly surpassed itself in showing it in the most phony way; had they shown her shooting from behind the rock responding to their fire, or the helmets not falling, or them just shooting at mist, terrified, it would have maybe worked. It's an enormous overreaction. That and, under no circumstance trebuchets are used that way anyway. And she did all this setup unseen, again.
In response to death, nothing is an enormous overreaction. Something or someone was killing them. They wanted to kill it, and they didn't have time for Facebook's famous brand of pseudo-myth-busting. What if they knew it was one girl shooting at them? They'd still have done the same. Being killed is a very personal matter.
Plot hole: The 'avalanche scene' in this remake is mind-boggling. For starters, the Witch single-handedly holds the whole Chinese army at bay splitting in a zillion of flying creatures - a power level completely inconsistent with the rest of the movie. To the annoyance of being pounced by little birds, the army gets in turtle formation, apparently just waiting it out. The Rourans somehow are ready for this and have a trebuchet set up - despite the fact that they are nomads, conquered the forts infiltrating them, and they were skirmishing a moment before. They throw flaming boulders with such precision that they are able to target each single 'testudo', multiple times, with the soldiers just sitting there with no reaction.To save them, Mulan is able to sneak behind them UNSEEN, by horse, with a bunch of extra helmets she somehow carried, set them in place, and fool them. Any of these convoluted operations would have taken an impossibly long time.
Suggested correction: This entry does not mention any plot hole in all of this. All this entry does is explaining what happened in the film and then ridiculing it. For example, the Rourans weren't "somehow" prepared for it; it was their plan from the start. Being mind-boggling is not a mistake.
"Any of these convoluted operations would have taken an impossibly long time" is not a plot hole? They were not expecting a field battle (the scene literally starts with them saying "They left the garrison!", so were thinking of an entirely different fight), they somehow just happened to have those never-seen-before trebuchets in the middle of nowhere and have them ready for a usage that is out of their capabilities. I could have split the entry in a couple different ones, but the scene is the same and I think they provide adequate context to what happens with the chain of unpredictable and illogic (even in the 'magic' of the movie world) events.
I'll answer your first question: "'Any of these convoluted operations would have taken an impossibly long time' is not a plot hole?" In another mistake entry, you've complained that Rourans took their sweet time, and called it another mistake. So, according to yourself, no, it is not a plot hole. Clearly, you didn't like the movie and write just about anything to trash it.
Apples and oranges; you are comparing an inconsistency in the length/scale of a military campaign with the feasibility of operating a trebuchet, (inconsistent even in the same scene) as if the two could be related in any way. I could write a review if I wanted to simply 'trash' the movie, let's not try to attach motives when someone points out an inconsistency, it's not an attack to the movie per se, or to the viewers who liked it. Some things about this movie do genuinely puzzle me, sure.
