Deliberate mistake: When Denzel Washington is in the bathroom, he discovers the camera monitoring him from the air vent, by seeing the light on the front of the camera. Any spy with common sense would not install a hidden camera with a light on it.
The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
1 deliberate mistake - chronological order
Directed by: Jonathan Demme
Starring: Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington, Jon Voight, Liev Schreiber, Anthony Mackie, Jeffrey Wright, Pablo Schreiber, Dorian Missick
Revealing mistake: When Raymond Shaw's skull is being drilled to implant the chip, bone "dust" comes out. This never happens, since always some blood comes out and the bone debris are mixed with blood and therefore unable to "fly" like wood or plaster debris.
Raymond Shaw: I served under him. He was a good man.
Eleanor Shaw: Well, that's what the neighbors always say about serial killers.
Question: There were two flashbacks of how Raymond Shaw killed one of the soldiers. One scene it showed him suffocating him in the desert with a piece of plastic. In another scene it shows him choking him with his hands in some kind of observation room. Was the desert 'killing', a dream combining the truth with the brainwashing?
Answer: The plastic bag killing was part of the dream. Many things in the dreams are off. For example in the dream he sees himself handling the pistol while lying in a bed. When we see his actual memory, he is standing, and Shaw hands him the gun, which he immediately uses.
Join the mailing list
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.
Chosen answer: Perhaps the piece-of-plastic killing was a "test run" by the brainwashers to see if Raymond would actually react to their commands. You can see other soldiers lying down wearing "halos", hinting that this happened at a different time and place than the observation room choking.