Plot hole: Simmons stands outside the 'The Monastery' at Petra (not to be confused with 'The Al Kazneh' at Petra where Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed) and looks at the horizon, and he is able to see the Air Force landing with Optimus by the pyramids. It then appears to take them mere minutes to drive over there. This is outright laughable, even accepting that they make the trip in an alien robot car. Petra and Cairo are separated by hundreds of miles of desert, not to mention Israel being between Egypt and Jordan.
Continuity mistake: While Mikaela and Sam are running through Egypt, they both take off their jackets. Sam drops his jacket, but in the next shot it's in his hand again.
Revealing mistake: Near the end, there's a slow motion shot of Sam and Mikaela running with explosions behind them. If you look at Mikaela closely, some fire goes right through her (this was added in post-production and they didn't rotoscope her properly).
Revealing mistake: When the group are outside talking to Jetfire in the aircraft 'boneyard', on the ground in the bottom right of the screen you can see the tyre tracks where the 3 cars are supposed to pull up to join the shot - then the car on the far right stops and pulls forward again till it's at the end of the tyre track.
Continuity mistake: When Lennox is demoted his rank is ripped from his shirt, but when he turns around his rank is back where it was originally.
Continuity mistake: In the scene where Sam is on the phone and explaining his hallucinations in college, he drops his papers on the stairs and there is a man that passes him. When they change the shot, the man is behind him again walking from the top of the stairs.
Continuity mistake: The multiple shots of the sinking Aircraft carrier are primarily shots of the CVN 74 (USS John C. Stennis) but also have shots of the CVN 72 (USS Abraham Lincoln) and the CVN 71 (USS Theodore Roosevelt). It is reported later on the news as the Roosevelt, and the Stennis is seen towards the end of the movie perfectly fine and providing air support.
Factual error: When Jetfire uses the "space bridge" to instantaneously move the characters from Washington, D.C. to the Middle East (on the other side of the planet), it was still daylight. 7:30 p.m. (summer closing hours at the museum) in D.C. is 2:30am where they arrived, but it was still broad daylight.
Visible crew/equipment: After escaping from Megatron, Sam and company go to a deserted junkyard. When Sam is leaning on the hood and Bumblebee drives forward and flashes his lights, a crew man can be seen in the driver's seat. This has been repeatedly corrected, wrongly, by the excuse that a few Transformers have been seen to create holographic drivers or pilots. This is not inaccurate, but cannot be plausibly applied to this case. (1) Bumblebee has never been seen to do this; in fact, no car-form Autobot has been shown to possess this ability, even in situations where it would seem sensible to do so. (2) There is nobody present who is unaware of Bumblebee's true nature, therefore he would have no reason to suddenly project one. (3) In the shots either side of this, no hologram is present. For the corrections to apply, we would have to accept that Bumblebee, for a matter of a few seconds, chose to display an ability that he's never shown to possess at any other time, in a situation where he has no reason to do so. Clearly this is not a supportable argument. This is a visible crew member and a valid mistake.
Factual error: When the Decepticons are reviving Megatron, General Morshower states something like "coming up from 9,000 fathoms". 9,000 fathoms is approximately 16,000 meters. The Laurentian Abyss, where it was stated in the first movie that Megatron was dropped, is around 6,000 meters deep.
Continuity mistake: In one scene we're shown a Predator B UAV taking off. This is a shot of an actual Predator B, which is a pusher turboprop. In a later scene we come back to the Predator, now on site, in a CG shot. The CG model is some kind of mutant Predator with a turbojet - no prop at all. This is the same mutant CG model used in TF1, but here it is a continuity error with the real shots.
Continuity mistake: When Mikaela's car is carried by a Decepticon helicopter, they are dropped in the building and there's a shot showing the airbags activating, but in the following shots (when the car stops moving or when they are getting out) the airbags are nowhere to be seen.
Continuity mistake: Just after Jetfire sacrifices himself, Ratchet orders Jolt to electrify, and we see Sam and Mikaela standing near Ratchet, but in the next shot when the Transformer's parts are flying towards Optimus, Sam is now a couple of feet away helping Mikaela stand up again.
Factual error: At the end of the movie where the action takes place on top of the Pyramid of Khafre (the big one in the middle), this same pyramid can be seen in the background. It is the same pyramid as this is the only one with limestone casing covering the top 1/3 of the pyramid.
Factual error: Right after the title the location moves to Shanghai, China and you see a train of a few oxide-red hoppers. One of them is lettered for the Missouri Pacific railroad, with the Mo-Pac eagle logo visible. Another hopper is lettered for Conrail. These American train cars would not be in China.
Visible crew/equipment: Near the end, when the Devastator is being transformed from the cement mixer, crane, bulldozer etc., the cement mixer with the Decepitcons' emblem stops abruptly and the stunt driver can be seen being thrown back into his seat.
Continuity mistake: When Mikaela is talking to Sam on the phone after Sam had his "nervous breakdown", when he is picking up the dropped papers, the people on the right coming down the stairs come down twice.
Continuity mistake: While we're repeatedly shown map views of the region while events are taking place in Jordan and Egypt, and characters even say things like they're "five klicks" (kilometers) from the water during the battle, things cover distance impossibly fast. For example, we're shown M-1 Abrams tanks being landed ashore by LCACs (Landing Craft Air Cushion), but just seconds later they're on site, engaging the Decepticons. This does not appear to be a time-lapse in the film itself, as we're shown the battle unfolding in what appears to be real-time. And that's ignoring that the pyramids, around which the battle is taking place, are really roughly 140 kilometers from the tip of the water. Even the closest point is around 120km from the water to pyramids.
Factual error: The British flag at NEST headquarters is upside down.
Chosen answer: He knows from stories passed down to him from older generations of bots, not much unlike stories about the past passed down to us from our ancestors. His line about no one telling him anything is just a way to avoid being put back in the box or being tortured by Mikayla.
dablues7