The book that 007 picks up from the Cuban sleeper, along with a revolver, is "A Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies", written by James Bond. Ian Fleming, an avid birdwatcher, named Bond after the author.

Pierce Brosnan disliked the gadgets and overblown effects of this movie. He suggested to the producers that the franchise go back to its more low-key, darker roots. Coincidentally, after Brosnan left, the next Bond movie was the low key and darker Casino Royale (2006), which was stripped of gadgets and extravagant visual effects and stunts.

The use of hovercraft by the North Korean Army to circumvent the minefields of the Demilitarized Zone is entirely fictional. However, the science show MythBusters (2003) tested the concept and found it plausible.

For the sword fight, the filmmakers decreased the film speed to make it look as if the actors were moving faster than they actually were.

Pierce Brosnan's least favorite Bond movie in which he appeared.

Continuity

When Bond arrives at the ice palace the valet gets into his car, but never takes it away, and is not in the car in the next shot of the car.

When Gustav lands in the parachute, a man is seen helping him take the harness off. When the camera angle changes, the man disappears, and he seems to be taking it off himself.

Colonel Moon is much shorter than James Bond. When he becomes Gustav Graves, he is similar in height. He grows several inches taller.

(at around 34 mins) Bond is in a Cuban bar about to look through a pair of binoculars. There are striking diagonal shadows on him from the roof of the bar. When the cut goes to him holding up the binoculars, all these shadows are not there - the shot is clean.

When Bond orders the Mojito in Cuba, they make it with golden rum, but when the drink is handed to him, it has been (correctly) made with white rum.



Factual errors

The amount of C-4 Bond places in the case at the beginning of the movie would be enough to flatten a huge land area, equivalent to the size of a large building. In the film, however, the explosion is incredibly small, and bystanders next to the detonation are shown to have only minor injuries.

As one's DNA is found in every cell, live or dead, in one's body, destroying bone marrow would not change it. To change DNA, it would require replacement of every cell, including, in effect, total brain death.

When Bond fights Zao in the Cuban clinic, he disarms Zao by switching on an MRI, which makes the gun fly out of his hand, then switching it off to grab the gun. MRI magnets take hours both to charge up and to power down. In addition, everything else in the room - the bed Zao was on, the IV stand, a steel tray that gets knocked over during the fight - all would have gone flying into the MRI along with the gun. In fact, it is impossible to have any equipment in an MRI room other than the actual MRI - a patient's bed would certainly not be situated right next to one.

In the scene where med-techs run in to resuscitate Bond, he touches one defibrillator paddle to each of the two male technicians and shocks them. In reality this would not work, as the current flows from one paddle to the other through the human body, and the paddles require 25 lbs of force at minimum to establish a good circuit. As the technicians are not touching, there is no completed circuit from paddle A to paddle B and thus, no current would flow.

The cruising speed of the Antonov 124 is approximately 500mph, which equates to nearly 1 mile every 6 seconds. It is very unlikely that cars dumped several seconds apart would land within a couple of hundred yards of each other.



Incorrectly regarded as goofs

Upon leaving the clinic, Bond has four diamonds. He then gives five to M. This is because he wagered one of his four with Graves and received an additional diamond when Bond won.

Bond places the ticket for the Alvarez Clinic in his inner right pocket, only to remove it later from his inner left pocket. This is a deliberate reference to a similar error in a previous Bond film, Licence to Kill (1989).

Bond enters Vauxhaull Cross Station and says that he has never been there before, but then we see that his old friends from Q Branch have their laboratory there. Previous films show that they relocate constantly.

In some scenes, Bond's invisible car is completely 100% invisible. In other scenes, the car appears with a blurry outline while in "invisible" mode. Since it's all imaginary technology, it works however the filmmakers want it to.

Some of the vehicles inside Colonel Moon's base are American Humvees, and the weapon picked up by Bond is a MAC-10. North Korean forces would never use American technology in real life. Colonel Moon was hiding illegally obtained weapons, so there is no reason they had to conform to North Korean military rules.



Revealing mistakes

At 10:10, during the hovercraft gun battle, the unconscious passenger is seen covering his ears due to the noise and particles of the explosive squibs 'ricocheting' around his head. When they stop, he lowers his hands back to act unconscious.

Colonel Moon is beating up the punching bag. Afterwards, it is unzipped and a man falls out. However, when he was beating up the punching bag, it was shaped like a regular punching bag, not like it had a man inside. If it had a man inside, there would have been a lot more air in the bag.

Some of the supposedly native North Koreans speak Korean with either South Korean accents/vocabulary or terrible Korean-American accents. North Koreans have different accents and use some different words than South Korean.

After showing the mechanical "second sun", the men take the control unit out of the auditorium and walk it to another area where there is a door operated by a "card-key'. But the door starts to open moments before the card-key is inserted into the slot.

When M visits Bond after he has been traded for Zao, she unlocks the door to enter his sealed room, then leaves 'locking' the door behind her. However, the light on the door locks remain green (unlocked) after she re-locks them, despite them originally being red when locked, then becoming green upon unlocking.



Miscellaneous

At the end, even though they are flying in a Russian plane, the voice telling them to pull up is in English, as are the writings on the instrument panel.

When Zao is in the laser chamber torturing Jinx with the electric hand, he moves it away from her chest, but "electricity" can still be seen on her.

The animosity from the NSA director towards MI6 is is unusual. In previous Bond films , US agents or officers like Felix Leiter, Chuck Lee and Felix Leiter supported Bond. Even though it is a different intelligence agency, the US is a close partner of the UK and a Five Eyes member.



Anachronisms

Bond orders a bottle of Bollinger from '61 in the hotel in Hong Kong, but the bottle in his room is actually a forgery. It is simply a standard "Bollinger Special Cuv?e" from around the film's release with the year "1961" added to the top corners of the label. Vintage Bollinger bottles from 1961 had a totally different label, quite unlike the modern one seen in the film.



Audio/visual unsynchronised

When Bond is talking to M in the subway there is a shot over Bond's shoulder that shows his mouth moving when he is not speaking.

When Bond first appears on the platform of the abandoned underground station, the door of the stairwell leading down can be heard to slam shut behind him. Wider shots of the platform show that there was, in fact, no door, and that Bond simply appeared on the platform without entering via any door whatsoever.

At the end of the movie, when Bond and Jinx are in the helicopter he tries to start it, you hear a piston engine trying to start. That helicopter is a NOTAR, equipped with a Rolls-Royce turbine engine.

When Jinx shoots the doctor in the clinic in Cuba, she fires two shots. She fires one shot, and then she stands up and fires a second shot. For the second shot, it plays the sound effect of a bullet being shot through a silencer, but if you look closely, not only does nothing come out of the gun, but it also appears that she doesn't even pull the trigger.

At the very end, the night shot of Vauxhall Bridge and MI6 Headquarters has a 2002 built Wright Gemini double deck bus passing in the foreground, the dubbed bus sound however is clearly that of a early 1960s-built Routemaster bus.



Crew or equipment visible

A boat is visible in the lower right corner of the screen filming the three surfers in the opening sequence.

Lighting equipment is reflected in the land-speed-record car before Bond pitches it over the ice cliff. Suspended vertically on the ice cliff, the camera and the back soundstage wall are visible, likewise reflected in its screen.

Reflected in Miranda's sunglasses during the initial demonstration of the Icarus satellite.

The camera is reflected in the back of the Aston Martin in two different shots when Bond carries Jinx out of the car after saving her.

Crew members, almost lined up, are reflected in Bond's binoculars at the beach bar as he looks out to sea. (These are not extras at the beach bar, as subsequent shots reveal only a couple of sparsely populated tables within the vicinity.)



Errors in geography

Korea, whether North or South, does not have surf beaches.

A water-buffalo witnesses the cars crashing into the rice paddy, supposedly in Korea, where no water-buffaloes live (water-buffaloes are creatures of the tropics; Korea has roughly the latitude and climate of New England.)

The ice-fields and glaciers of Iceland are mostly in the center of the country, not near the coast, where it is barren and rocky. An exception to this is the lake of J?kuls?rl?n, which is famous even though much smaller than the lake shown.

Bond and Zao are swapped in the middle of a thick evergreen forest. Panmunjom, the only point along the DMZ where one can walk between North and South Korea, is grassy fields and hills.

There are absolutely no gymnosperm forests in Iceland at all. So a wildfire caused by a laser weapon can't take place.



Plot holes

Colonel Moon disappears the day Bond is captured and is presumed dead. Bond spent fourteen months in captivity and perhaps one month in the medical suite in M's remote headquarters. In that time, Moon has completed the gene therapy to transform into Gustav Graves, establish himself as a billionaire philanthropist, and get honored for his services with a knighthood. Generally civilians are honored with the Order of the British Empire, which has several levels and a knighthood is rarely offered until after decades of service. For example, Roger Moore received a Commander of the British Empire in 1999 after a decade of working prominently with UNICEF; he received the Knighthood four years later.

It is understandable that Graves wanted to kill Jinx in a way that looked accidental, but surely there was a simpler way to do it then partially melting his own palace? Also, him using his own satellite to do that could've drawn a lot of unwanted attention.

There is absolutely no reason any facility would have lasers that flail around randomly.

Bond looks remarkably well-fed and healthy for someone who has been imprisoned in North Korea for over a year. He would surely be suffering from nutritional and dental problems given his circumstances.

On the plane, Graves chastises the engineer because the Icarus controller is the same size as a suitcase and to "fix it". Mere moments later, he's presented with a body-armor styled controller which fits and works perfectly. Even if there was room on the plane for an engineering shop, there is no way he could have made it so quickly.



Character error

When Bond is using the sniper rifle, Jinx utters some nonsense about "Windage 1 and 1/2." This information is useless to Bond, without some type of direction or denomination. Equally we are told that Bond is only shooting from 300 meters making such information unnecessary.

When Bond returns to the Ice Palace (after stealing the land speed vehicle) he gets back into to his car. When he approaches the car, just before entering, he hides behind it. However, this would be pointless, as the cameras on his side of the car would project the image of him onto the opposite side, as the car is in 'stealth mode'. Which means any guards who looked would clearly see 007 squatting in the snow.

Zao is not a Korean name, it is Chinese. Although many Koreans do have Chinese names, including Zao, they have no "z" sound in their own language and pronounce the name as "Jo" or "Cho". The pronunciation of Zao is Chinese, but the well-known Chinese last name is actually pronounced Zhao, which both spells and pronounces differently from Zao. Of course nothing prevents someone from choosing any of the Chinese characters that are pronounced Zao as their last name, but it'd be a very uncommon one.

When Bond disables the video camera in the Cuban clinic, he pulls out the zoom lens drive cable, rather than the video feed cable. The camera is likely to continue working, just not able to adjust the focal length.

The American official states that if the beam "crosses the 38th Parallel, we'll hit them with everything we got!" The 38th Parallel has not been the dividing line between the two Koreas since 1950. The DMZ splits the two countries and most of the 38th Parallel lies south of the DMZ.