Patzer

When Tintin returns home after encountering the pickpocket, the front door is open but is unmarked and missing the bullet holes made when Barnaby Dawes was shot. When Allan closes it after subduing Tintin, the bullet holes have reappeared.

After Barnaby is shot multiple times in the back, there is a brief shot of Tintin looking over the back of his jacket and there are no bullet holes or bloodstains.

When Bianca Castafiore is about to sing, the music played is introducing an aria from Barber of Seville, by Rossini. When she starts singing, it is an aria from a completely different opera, Roméo et Juliette, by Gounod.

When Tintin shows Thompson and Thomson the newspaper Barnaby was marking with blood after being injured, there is a large, round bloodstain at the end of the newspapers name. When they are outside saying goodbye, the only bloodstain in that area is a finger-thick stain of blood going downwards at about the middle of the page.

When Tintin returns from the library to find his 'Unicorn' missing, the sofa is back to normal position. It was upturned before he left, when Snowy was chasing the cat.

The photographers shooting Bianca Castafiore would have been using flash bulbs. These were single-use devices made up of a glass bulb filled with oxygen and a magnesium filament. While they are sometimes shown ejecting a bulb, they often manage to get multiple shots from a single bulb.

The photographers shooting Bianca Castafiore use cameras like the Graflex Speed Graphic. While it was correct that the image on the ground glass focusing screen would be upside down, that image could only be seen if the film (sheet film holder) was not in place. In normal use, the photographer would have likely used the rangefinder and the top-mounted wire frame viewer - never looking at the ground glass focusing screen.

The Unicorns powder room has several lamps hanging. The powder room of a proper naval vessel (or any other proper ship) would never be allowed to have open fires from lamps or anything else. Even normal shoes or boots could not be worn. Lighting came trough a glass pane from an adjacent room.

Allen orders his mate to bring TNT and the mate returns with dynamite. Dynamite contains no TNT, but is actually stabilized nitroglycerin.

The film is presumably set in a European country, and yet UK currency is used at the beginning of the movie when the artist paints the classic cartoon picture of Tintin.

When the ship leaves the harbour early in the film, the starboard side of the ship passes a red navigation light. This IS correct for a European port. Only in a port in the Americas should the light have been green.

Tintin's wallet is pulled out of his back pocket while it is clearly buttoned shut.

When Bianca Castafiore is singing all the glass in the room shatters, even some spectacles, yet still Sakharine's spectacles do not.

When the Unicorn picks up Red Rackham's ship by the mast and hoists it into the air, the footage of Red Rackham's ship swinging towards the screen begins, then cuts after barely a second and swings towards the screen again.

When flares appear on screen (like Tintin's flashlight), you can clearly see the staple anamorphic flare of the blue horizontal lines, yet, the bokeh in every shot is spherical, not anamorphic, making the lens flares impossible, because spherical lenses don't produce blue or horizontal flares, unless specifically made so.

When the pickpocket is showing his collection the reflection in his spectacles reveals the "lenses" to be flat, that is ordinary glass.

Tintin describes a poem as "written in Old English". That is not technically accurate. In the strict linguistic sense, it is Early Modern English, like Shakespeare. Old English was in use between the 5th and 11th centuries BC.

At several points during the film, characters talk about "INTERPOL". While the organization that we now commonly know as INTERPOL first came about in 1923, well before the time of the film, it did not take the name "INTERPOL" until 1956. Prior to that it was the International Criminal Police Organization or ICPO. "INTERPOL" was its telegraphic address and where it got its current name from.

In the market Sakharine offers to write a check for the model of the Unicorn using a retractable ballpoint pen (you can even hear the click). Ballpoints were not sold in Belgium or the UK until December 1945 (and came into widespread use in the 1950s) and the retractable ballpoint pen was not invented until 1959. The movie takes place in the early 1930s based on the dates on the newspaper cutouts showing Tintin's reporting.

Upon arriving on Morocco, Bianca Castafiore states "it's my first time in the Third World". This term was first coined in 1952, and did not refer to such countries until later years.

After Sakharine's car is smashed against several walls while dangling from a crane, it is shown to have the remains of broken tempered safety glass windows on the side. This is the glass which breaks into tiny segments and is fitted to all new cars, but it wasn't used until the late 1930s. As the film takes place before this, the car's glass should have shattered into large shards like a house window.

A common error: in some of the fight scenes, the bad guys are using what appear to be German-made MP 40 or possibly MP 38 machine pistols. As their names imply, these were designed in 1940 and 1938 respectively, so would not have been invented at the time the action takes place.

When Allan finds out that Tintin has blocked the door to the cabin where he is being held, he tells Tom to get TNT. In the following shot of Tom preparing the dynamite, he says there are other ways to open the door. But in this shot, Allan's mouth is moving and Tom's isn't.

Tintin refers to a wall map to locate Bagghar from the clue he has found. He finds it very quickly in Morocco although the map is plainly of fictional islands looking more like Indonesia.

When Sakharine first meets Tintin in the market, he never introduces himself. Yet later in Marlinspike Hall, Tintin says, "I'm looking for answers, Mr. Sakharine." He then continues to call him by name throughout the movie.

The Unicorn model's salesman states that the model is 2 quid (2 pounds), but Tintin offers to buy it for 1 pound, which the salesman agrees to. However, this is set in 1930s Brussels, Belgium, and the Belgian currency at that time was Belgian Francs (until 2002, when Euros were introduced). Pounds are the British currency, and have never been accepted in other countries. Furthermore, pound coins were not introduced until 1971.

The seaplane is marked CN-3411 and Tintin says that the plane is the Portuguese Markings, but the code CN-3411 are the Moroccan Markings.

There is no need to constantly check the coordinates while on the move in the car. They would check them beforehand on a map, discovered that they point to Marlinspike Hall, driven there and then took a fix to see what specific spot on the grounds they pointed to.

By the point in the book series at which the film takes place, Tintin only wore white socks and never wore black socks with his trademark blue sweater.

Sakharine was not an ancestor of Red Rakham in the original books.