The Sum of All Fears

Deliberate mistake: When Ryan is entering the Pentagon to use the hotline, he swipes Cabot's ID card multiple times until finally the gate opens. There are two problems with this. First, if the system beeps, as it did every time he swiped, that means the system saw the response from the card so he shouldn't have needed to keep swiping. Second, the entry to the Pentagon uses a two-factor system, meaning you need to swipe and then enter a corresponding PIN on the keypad that was quite visible in the scene. This is to prevent exactly what Ryan did, namely steal an ID card and use it to get into the Pentagon since the thief wouldn't know the PIN. Since the keypad was there, for the movie the director must have decided all the real steps were too hard to fit the kind of scene he wanted so left it out. (01:44:00)

jimba

Deliberate mistake: When asked about the effects of a gas attack on a village in Russia, the president is told that the effects were similar to end stage cerebral palsy. One major problem - cerebral palsy is a chronic condition, not acute. The condition itself is not fatal.

Thisbe

Factual error: A force of Russian Tu-22 Backfire bombers attacks the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) by sneaking in under the ship's radar. This is all well and good except that carriers usually don't use their own radar, they have Airborne Early Warning aircraft (E-2 Hawkeye's) that can see much further and not give away the carrier's position (let alone the F-14s which would be patrolling too) not to mention the fleet of destroyers other ships guarding the carrier. The whole point is, the US Navy practiced and planned for such a "carrier versus Backfire" battle for years. I guess in the interest of furthering the plot Hollywood has to ignore the immense measures the USN takes to protect those multi-billion dollar assets, not to mention the 5000+ sailors that man them.

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Jack Ryan: General, the President is basing his decisions on some really bad information right now. And if you shut me out, your family, and my family, and twenty-five million other families will be dead in thirty minutes.

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Trivia: The SuperBowl game was filmed in Montreal, Quebec in Canada and the two teams are the Montreal Alouettes and Toronto Argonauts of The Canadian Football League. They just put them in different uniforms to film them.

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Question: As President Fowler is being escorted from the football stadium, he tells Cabot to "get the people out of here." How did the President know that the bomb was in the building? No one in the scene knew its exact location, so why does he think that if the fans leave the stadium they will be safe?

Answer: The President telling Cabot to "get the people out of here" is just a political life boat. If asked what he did when he found out about the bomb he can "honestly" say he asked for an evacuation.

It's unlikely at such a time of panic that one would consider a 'political life boat'. There's also nothing in the character as presented to suggest that would be his thought process. The president's just been told that there's a bomb in Baltimore (not the building) and says "get those people out of the stadium." He's being evacuated from a location that contains thousands of other people. It's fair to assume he knows all those people are also in danger so wants them evacuated too.

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