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Audio/visual unsynchronised (4) |
Character error (4) |
Continuity (24) |
Errors in geography (3) |
Factual errors (10) |
Incorrectly regarded as goofs (1) |
Plot holes (6) |
Revealing mistakes (30) |
Spoilers (3)
Audio/visual unsynchronised
When Drax asks Bond, "Why did you break off the encounter with my pet python?", his lips are saying "boa constrictor."
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When Drax is "playing" the Raindrop Prelude on the piano, his hands are either playing different notes to the music, moving at the wrong time or not touching the keys at all.
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When Drax's dogs spot Bond at the shotgun range, they are heard growling, but their facial expression and the positioning of their ears are obviously those of contented and relaxed Doberman Pinschers.
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During the fight scene in the Ambulance, Bond and the "doctor" exchange punches. Bond is up against the wall, and the doctor throws two punches that completely miss, however, it plays sounds as if both punches connected.
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Character error
Drax' henchman is listed as "Chang" in the end credits. However, all of the characters in the movie pronounce his name like "Char".
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In the Bond movies, Bond goes through the utmost determination to keep his "007" codename a secret. Therefore it makes no sense for him to carry around a camera that has "007" printed on it, because if ever compromised, this basically gives away his identity.
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As they are chasing the final globe in Moonraker 5, Bond remarks "It's getting hot" and Goodhead replies that she is taking them down at a steeper angle than normal. Despite this, the Thermal Protection System means there would be no temperature rise inside the cockpit.
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Whilst chasing the third globe in Drax's Moonraker, Goodhead says; "The wings and beginning to glow", but the wings of a shuttle orbiter aren't visible from the pilots' seats.
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Continuity
Bond's clothes but not his hair dry very quickly after he kills Drax' snake.
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When Corinne runs into the forest and is chased by the two dogs, her shoes change from tan high-heel shoes to sneakers and blue knee-socks.
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The helicopter that takes Bond from Los Angeles International Airport to Drax's estate has a registration number visible on the bottom (belly of the aircraft) when it departs the airport, but not when it lands at the Drax estate.
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When Bond is being flown by helicopter to Drax's estate, the pilot's hairstyle changes half way through the flight and her headset disappears for the second half of the flight.
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Bond is shown not wearing his wrist-gun for the last third of the film, but the gun reappears when he needs it at the very end of the film. During the Amazon speedboat chase, the hang glider ride, and the underwater python battle, his sleeves are rolled up and the dart gun is absent. When he is escorted inside Drax' underground lair, his right sleeve is suddenly rolled down. It is possible that he was carrying it around in a pocket and put it on when he put his spacesuit on, but more likely, they wanted Bond's sleeves rolled up while he was in Brazil but didn't want the bulky wrist-gun showing.
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When Jaws is chasing Bond during the parachute scene at the start, the distant shots show him with clear wind goggles but the close up shots show darker tinted goggles.
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Chang watches Bond leave the room in which Bond finds the safe. When Bond walks away from the room, we see Chang's rear profile standing up, in the next shot he's back crouching in the corner again.
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Jaws bites through the rope wire of the cable car. But when we see the winding wheel a second time, the rope is complete. In actual fact, it would take exerted pressure well in excess of 2,000psi to snap a steel cable. Furthermore, if Jaws had severed the cable, it would have unwound with great force (and damage), and the cars would no longer be able to operate.
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After Bond kills the python, Jaws pulls Bond out of the pond and Jaws' trousers are quite dripping wet. In the next shot, Jaws' trousers are dry when he walks into the shuttle control centre.
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When Jaws' speed boat goes over the waterfall he is clearly seen but his two colleagues wearing yellow disappear even though they were seen in the previous shot.
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When Bond leaves his boat via hang-glider, we never see it fall off the waterfall behind him, even though there are two shots where it should have been visible.
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After Bond is imprisoned with Dr. Goodhead, the ceiling begins to slide open and we can see that they are actually underneath the launching pad of one of the shuttles. The jet thrusters of the shuttle are above the level of the opening but when Drax appears beside the shuttle, the thrusters are now below the level of the opening. A minute later, as the shuttle prepares for liftoff, the thrusters are back above the opening.
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Moments before Dr. Goodhead jumped with Bond out of the cable car structure in Pão de Açúcar she is wearing high heel, opened toe shoes. When she jumps and reaches the ground her shoes are flat and closed toe. It is visible that the scene is performed by a stunt using a wig.
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When Bond and Jaws are fighting on the cable cars, Jaws falls through the sunroof. Bond and Goodhead slam the sunroof shut. It then cuts to a camera shot of Jaws from above, where the sunroof is obviously open.
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When Jaws goes over the waterfall, he is holding onto a steering wheel. It cuts to the next shot of Jaws going over the waterfall, and the steering wheel has disappeared.
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When Bond and Goodhead escape through the ventilation shaft, the flame discharge from the Moonraker taking off "follows" them through the corridor. It cuts back to a shot of the Moonraker taking off, and you can see the flames are barely wide enough to touch the inner walls, let alone to follow Bond and Goodhead through the shaft.
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During the free-fall, the color of Jaws' safety goggles keeps changing from clear to yellow.
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Jaws pops the champagne cork with his teeth. His girlfriend is holding the glasses. It cuts away for about a second and it cuts back, and both champagne glasses are filled already.
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When Bond is in M's office, he tests his wrist-gun. The dart becomes lodged in M's painting on the wall. Bond is not actually facing the painting and therefore the trajectory of the dart does not line up with it.
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When the first four Moonrakers take off, they do so in quick succession. Before the fifth takes off, there is just enough time for Drax to consign Bond to his fate and then board it, but before the sixth, Bond and Goodhead can escape, hide, jump the crew, get into their uniforms and still make it to the shuttle in time.
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Drax announces to Bond and Goodhead how they are to be left to be incinerated under his Moonraker, then, split seconds later, he is already strapped into the pilot's seat, hundreds of feet up.
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After the snake fight, Jaws goes to grab Bond out of the pool. From Bind POV, Jaws reaches down with his wrists together. In the next shot, he has now a hand on each of Bond's shoulders.
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One of Drax's men shoots two of the US astronauts who are getting ready to open the airlock to the shuttle, even though the shuttle hasn't yet docked. The astronauts should not be on the station yet.
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Jaws and his girlfriend float from outer space to being rescued back on earth in less than five minutes.
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Errors in geography
There are no Mayan pyramids in the Amazon rainforest.
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When Bond and Dr. Goodhead are abducted in the Rio de Janeiro ambulance, the British Airways billboard advert is in English and not Portuguese.
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When Bond, Q, and M are discussing the rare orchid the map of Brazil shows central Brazil. However, when Bond is shown on the river being chased by the bad guys, his boat ends up going over Foz do Iguaçu. These falls are in southern Brazil, which is about 1000 miles from where Bond is supposed to be.
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Factual errors
The pilot's parachute lacks leg straps.
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The pods of the space station are shown at all angles to the axis, but rotationally produced "gravity" is always away from the axis. Also, gravity would not change instantaneously when going from one corridor to another.
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It is stated that the space station is not visible from Earth because it is using radar jamming. First, radar jamming consists of broadcasting interference, which makes the presence of the jammer known. Second, an object 200 meters across in low Earth would be visible to the naked eye - as the current smaller space station is.
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When the last Moonraker shuttle launches, the counter reads "T-" (T minus), however, it incorrectly counts forwards instead of backwards. (The timers for all the other Moonraker shuttles counted backwards.)
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After discovering the orbiting space station, the Air Force immediately launches a space shuttle to investigate, which is impossible at such a short notice. Orbital missions have to be planned two years in advance, just to avoid collision with orbiting debris.
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The American shuttle is launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. While Vandenberg does have a Space Command, it only launches unmanned satellites, and is not equipped with Space Shuttles.
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Laser beams travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), so it will not appear to travel as a bolt or pulse of light. Instead, it would instantaneously connect the gun and the target.
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The countdown for Moonraker 3 counts down to "3-2-1" and one of the technicians then says "Main engine start", but the main engines are actually started about 3 seconds before zero, in order to give them time to build up thrust before liftoff at T-0. The countdown for Moonraker 5 also reaches zero before the engines are lit.
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The blast from Moonraker 5 above where Bond and Dr. Goodhead are imprisoned is unbelievably light, when in fact the blast from a space shuttle on liftoff shoots flaming exhaust for hundreds of feet and much denser than the mere puffs of fire that are shown.
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When Bond and Dr. Goodhead chase the final globe in Drax's shuttle they have to enter the Earth's atmosphere to catch it. Once committed to this manoeuvre, all space vehicles must return to earth, yet we see our heroes back in orbit at the very end of the film.
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Incorrectly regarded as goofs
The announcement at the airport in London calls "BA flight 128 to Rio de Janeiro", but the Concorde, when it lands and passengers disembark, is an Air France plane. These are two different flights - the first Jaws' and the second being Bond's. Obviously they could not have been on the same plane or they would have seen each other, eliminating the surprise appearances later.
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Plot holes
How come the glass vial, designed to be dropped through the earth's atmosphere from over 100 miles up, cannot even survive being knocked off a desk onto the floor?
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Many military nerve gases are designed to be absorbed by the skin as well as by breathing them, specifically to make a mere gas mask useless. As Q could not have known what other toxins were in the laboratory, they would have put Bond, the Minister and M in full length protective suits not just gas masks.
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When Goodhead asks Bond about the lethal bacteria satellites on board the space station, he says not to worry as they will be destroyed when the space station breaks up. At that point, however, with zero knowledge of the station's design, Bond has no reason to expect this whatsoever. The first explosion and failure of the superstructure indeed happens a split second AFTER Bond's reply.
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How did Bond know that Drax's shuttle had a laser?
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If the laser in Drax's shuttle that Bond mysteriously knew about (nobody told him) was indeed automatic as Bond indicated while they were shooting down the globes, then why did Bond need to press a "fire" button to destroy them?
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Considering the lethal nature of the poison nerve gas, and the delicate nature of the glass vials that contain it, it seems unlikely that the globes would be constructed in Venice and then flown all the way to Rio in flimsy wooden cases. It would be much more practical to construct them entirely in situ.
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Revealing mistakes
During the weightlessness on the space station you can see a cord holding up 007 in a close-up shot.
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When the enemy boat is firing some sort of projectile cannon at Bond during the boat fight, you can see the water jets used to simulate the explosion.
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During the speedboat chase scene, as Bond is being pursued by Jaws, we see a wide shot of Bond's boat approaching a treacherous waterfall. The way the shot is set up, Bond's boat is speeding toward the camera while the falls are in the foreground. The waterfall is an obvious matte painting. Take a look at the flow of the river in comparison with the falls. The river is clearly flowing freely from right to left, right up to the point where the waterfall begins. We can see that the waterfall is a powerful one which means that the flow of the river should be following it as the falls suck it downward, but that isn't the case.
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When Bond is in one of the corridors of Drax's space station as the station rattles from the attack, many of the "metal" walls flex as if made of foam or rubber.
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When Jaws unlocks Moonraker Five so Bond and Goodhead can escape, the "metal" bar he is seen flexing is clearly not made of metal due to the easy flexibility.
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When Moonraker 3 is launched, the wires attached to the model can be seen briefly at the top of the screen.
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The warning sign on the door to the satellite manufacturing laboratory is incorrectly a radiation hazard sign, even though there is no implication of radioactivity in the lab. The sign should be a biohazard sign, as the contents of the vials are clearly demonstrated to be quite hazardous to humans.
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In the opening sequence, James Bond, Jaws, and the pilot free fall for nearly two minutes. For that amount of free fall time, the jump would have to be made at or above above 25,000 feet, which would require oxygen equipment.
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In the first scene the Moonraker is on the back of the 747, when it flies away the 747 blows up and drops straight down in one piece as if it was stationary and not flying at cruise speed.
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When it cuts to the scene right before Jaws hits the circus tent, he is not falling near as fast as somebody who just jumped out of an airplane without a parachute would be falling.
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After Jaws passes through the metal detector and sets off the alarm, a woman walks through right after him, and is wearing gold arm bracelets, and doesn't set the alarm off.
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When Bond is 'pulled' into the water by the snake, it cuts very rapidly between several shots. In some of the shots, it appears the snake is not struggling with Bond at all, and he can leave the water freely at any time. In other shots, the snake appears to be dead before Bond actually kills it.
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In many of the outer space scenes, you can predict the direction the shuttles are heading in, because if you look closely you can see a black "path" on the screen where there are no stars.
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When Bond is free-falling, you can see the outline of his hidden parachute bulging out beneath his jacket. Also, the back side of his jacket is obviously pinned somehow to hide the parachute, otherwise it would be flapping all over the place from the wind. The same thing applies for the henchman, after Bond steals his parachute.
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During the free-fall fight scene, the landscape below changes so many different times. It is obviously due to multiple takes of this scene.
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These laser guns are supposedly hot enough to kill everybody who gets shot with one, yet, their clothing is mysteriously left unaffected: no burn marks or holes or anything.
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When Drax's astronauts are being discharged from the spaceship in large numbers, they seem to pass freely from inside the space station to outer space, without having to go through an airlock chamber or similar.
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The contortion of Bond's face does not match the direction of real acceleration on a centrifuge. The effect of acceleration is actually felt down the length of the arm, not in the direction of circular travel. In actuality, he would have felt the force out the end of the arm, or toward the door of the pod.
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During the gondola hovercraft scene through St. Mark's Square, the fringe at the bottom of the gondola hangs freely as if the vehicle is actually on wheels, rather than being blown around due to the cushion of air.
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The external tank separates from Moonraker 6 too fast, as though it was falling away.
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When Bond and Goodhead enter zero gravity in their Moonraker, the objects in the ship float, but Goodhead's long hair does not.
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When Bond and Chang are fighting in the glass museum, there is a vase that is attached to a weight displacement pad that sets an alarm off. When Chang smashes the vase in half, that would also reduce its weight by half, yet, the alarm does not go off.
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During the chase on the Amazon river, Bond fires an underwater missile at one of the boats. The missile hits the rear of the boat, however, the explosion is in the front of the boat.
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When the Moonrakers dock with the space station, the Moonraker doors clearly do not align with the airlock.
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While in zero gravity, the actors move their limbs very, very slowly (while reaching for a switch, or writing on a clipboard, etc). While moving one's arms very slowly may fool the audience in thinking "wow, there's no gravity there", there's really no reason to move so slowly. Lack of gravity does not make your body movements slow down.
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During the struggle on the space station, one of the control panels moves from one of Drax's subject weight as he moves forward, indicating that it is merely a prop and not bolted down.
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Jaws pours champagne into his and Dolly's glass, and they drink it, although there's no gravity on the space station. In zero gravity, all liquids are in the form of bubbles.
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During the Moonraker flight to the space station, the "master race" couples are in zero gravity. Yet none of the hair on any of the women floats.
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As Jaws is swept away by the revellers in Rio, the camera's shadow can be seen thrown onto them.
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Under Moonraker 5, the time on Bond's watch leaps from 10:08:21 to 10:08:42 in a matter of seconds. This is because the latter time is actually a still mock-up of the display, printed onto the prop Seiko for narrative purposes.
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Spoilers
Continuity
When Drax gets sucked into outer space, he falls straight backwards, with no rotation. When it cuts to the next shot, his body is rotating over and over, backwards.Share this
Plot holes
The fate of Drax' "master race" couples is unresolved, as we are never told what happened to them.Share this
Revealing mistakes
When the Drax space station is being destroyed, most of the particles fall downwards, revealing gravity.Share this
