The picture Ben takes with his mobile camera of the document is different from what Patrick gets as picture message.
When Ben prepares to put his hand into the bird at Mount Rushmore, he does not have a watch on but, the first time his puts his hand in, we see a watch. When he puts his hand in again, the watch is gone, then, in subsequent shots, it moves up and down his wrist.
In the London car chase, Wilkinson's Land Rover pulls up on the side of the bridge after he punctures his tire. The camera then zooms in on his front bumper bar slightly hitting a construction barrier, but in the next shot from a distance, the car is clearly nowhere near the barrier.
When Mitch Wilkinson's team (with Ben's mother prisoner) are climbing the stairs to Mount Rushmore, they are looking at the traffic camera picture of Ben holding the first wooden carving. While they potentially could have had a copy from Ben's mother, they had the original for her to translate.
When the Mercedes's back up camera flips up at the beginning of the chase scene, the restaurant on the right of the screen is completely empty. In the next shot, there is a waiter cleaning a table.
Although a cell phone can be "cloned" in real life, the "cloned" phone cannot allow its user to eavesdrop on a connection made between the "host" phone and another phone.
Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln appear to be the only occupants of the presidential box at Ford's Theatre, but Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris also sat in the double box with the President and First Lady. After shooting President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth stabbed Major Rathbone in the arm before jumping down to the stage; this action which is omitted in the film. The film also shows the audience reacting in terror to Booth's appearance, in fact they assumed it was part of the play, and did not realize until several minutes later that a murder had been committed.
While in the City of Gold, Riley handles a very large gold brick with one hand and easily places it in his bag. A gold brick as large as the one pictured would weigh in the neighborhood of 150lbs and would require two or more people to lift.
The President tells the Secret Service agents that he trusts Ben and doesn't need them to come in. In reality, the President of the United States is not allowed to refuse Secret Service help.
Buckingham Palace is only open to visitors at the end of August and the beginning of September, when Queen Elizabeth II is visiting other palaces. Yet less than three days after breaking into Buckingham, and stealing the plank from the first desk, the treasure hunters attend the Easter celebration (March or April) at the White House.
Gold was barely, or completely unknown to the ancient Olmec culture. Of course further cultures found it, and used it, but it was a couple hundred years later.
The movie is obviously fictionalizing elements of real people and societies for the sake of a more interesting story.
In the scene on the White House lawn, the child says that Booth crossed the only bridge open out of Washington to escape, saying it was an example of a conspiracy. However, the Long Bridge which Booth crossed that night was indeed closed at the time of his crossing. Booth was a well known celebrity in Washington and simply charmed the guard in charge (who was unaware of the assassination) into letting him across after hours.
Obviously, the child was espousing conspiracy theories which are typically based on lies or half-truths.
When Ben first finds the wooden board containing "pre-Columbian" writing, he remarks that "These markings look Incan or Aztec." Although the Inca never developed a formal writing system, they did carve markings.
The film implies that the Knights of the Golden Circle was engaged by the Confederacy to find the City of Gold. There isn't any evidence that the Confederacy engaged the Knights of the Golden Circle in any capacity, but this movie series is about previously unknown history coming to light.
If Estevanico was taken from Florida to Cibola by Native Americans, the the journey to South Dakota would take months walking. But the Spanish brought horses.
During the scene when the police and FBI enter the Library of Congress ground floor and start to fan out, several of the officers (particularly the first officer pointing where to go) can be seen to be making 'guns' with their hands instead of having prop guns in hand.
During the car chase, Ben runs a red light to get a photo of the plank. That photo must be from a speed camera, not a red light camera. The text at the top says that the speed limit is 70 km/h. In the UK speeds are measured in mph, not km/h. In most of London the speed limit is 30 mph or 48 km/h, not 70. When they were crossing Westminster Bridge, the clock on St. Stephen's Clock Tower (aka Big Ben) showed about 8:20, and yet the timestamp in the photo says 13:37, more than five hours later.
The same shot of Ben's hand as he prepares to put it into the bird at Mount Rushmore is used twice.
While sitting in the Gates' household using his laptop, the apple on Riley Poole's black MacBook is not lit up, yet Riley is working on the laptop. The apple on MacBooks lights up when the screen is on, because the light to illuminate the symbol comes from the light used to illuminate the screen. Therefore, the MacBook Poole is working on is asleep or turned off.
The same shot of Wilkinson's henchman cocking his gun is used twice during the car chase scene.
Never well-funded or organized, the the Knights of the Golden Circle dissolved before the end of the Civil War. In fact, the membership expelled the group's main founder in 1860 due to his sheer ineptitude.
Though the movie begins on the night of Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, the cipher page from that scene points to a clue (Laboulaye Lady) whose key information is a quote dated 1876. This date ends up being used as part of a combination in the next clue.
Just before Lincoln is shot by Booth in 1865, he closes the door to the theater box in a bird's eye view of the box. There is a lighting fixture on the far left that has an incandescent bulb in it.
When the fire engines are arriving at Buckingham Palace we hear a US style siren. LFB fire engines don't make the deep electric horn sound like US ones. The siren sound would have been dubbed on in ADR, this is because when using emergency vehicles in the UK for filming it's not permitted to use the siren on public roads as the sound is easily dubbed on after wards, although permission is granted to use lights and display insignia for visual effect.
When Ben and Abigail are fighting in Buckingham Palace. Ben takes a ride down the banister when Abigail shouts "Ben" the sound is before her mouth is moving.
While looking at the Statue of Liberty, Ben says "Laboulaye had to leave a clue somewhere", but his mouth doesn't move.
When Riley is flying his radio controlled helicopter towards the Lady Liberty statue in Paris, the helicopter sounds are from a full sized passenger helicopter, and not the sounds of a small model helicopter.
When Ben Gates is speaking at the conference in the beginning of the movie, the camera is panning back and forth around the one column. On one of the first pans around the column, if you look closely, you will notice that the voice of Gates does not match his lips in the shot.
When Ben breaks into Abigail's house, the camera angle gradually moves upward. Towards the front door while the camera shot is moving are crew members scuffling by quickly so as to not be caught on camera.
In the shot from inside the cave before they enter, there's a silhouette on the left side of the screen. After they all have entered the cave the figure is still visible and actually moves at the bottom of the screen.
Obvious floodlights hidden behind rocks throughout the climactic cave scenes.
Several desks were made from the dismantled timbers of the HMS Resolute. One of those desks is the desk sitting in the Oval Office, which has been used by just about every President since Rutherford B. Hayes, who first received it as a gift from Queen Victoria in 1880. However, there is no twin desk that is a replica of the one in White House, and none of the desks are in Buckingham Palace.
When Riley is in the restroom at Buckingham Palace, the toilet in the booth that he chose is clearly an American-style toilet, and not a British toilet that would normally be present at Buckingham Palace.
When Ben and Riley are in Paris and flying the toy helicopter, you can see the Eiffel Tower on the screen on Riley's control. In the next scene when Ben talks with the French police you can see the Eiffel Tower on the other side of the bridge.
There is no reason for the FBI to be interested in: (1) Ben Gates' ancestor being implicated in the Lincoln assassination, or (2) Mitch Wilkinson turning up at a lecture on the assassination with a page from the Booth diary. There is no reason to start a discussion about this, let alone start an investigation.
The secret room in the library that requires a presidential code to enter contains hundreds of books that are apparently not secret because the entire room is visible from other parts of the library.
The President says that many people know Ben kidnapped & held him against his will. But no one knows anything about what happened in the tunnel. The secret service only knows that the President said everything was fine, and that he & Ben then disappeared. If the President said it was an accident, and that Ben helped him find his way out, there would be no arrest.
After Riley jumps into his shiny red Ferrari, a reflection is seen in the car's paint on screen left.
During the infiltration of Buckingham Palace, Gates states that Queen Elizabeth II was not in residence due to the absence of a flag flying there. In fact there is always a flag flying at the palace. Prior to the death of Princess Diana the presence of the Queen was indicated by the flying of a flag, however, at the time of Diana's death the palace wished to fly a flag at half mast as a mark of respect. Since then the Union Flag is flown when the Queen is not in residence and the Royal Standard is flown when she is. This allows for a flag to be flown at half mast during a time of mourning.
Ben Gates says that the expression "His name is mud," has its origin in Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set John Wilkes Booth's leg and enabled his escape after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, and was thereby taken to be a conspirator. Contrary to this common misconception, the expression dates to the 1820s, some 40 years before the assassination.
When Abigail Chase talks about the seal which refers to the President's Book of Secrets, she mistakenly says that the scroll the eagle holds is instead of the olive branch, which can clearly be seen in the eagle's right claw. The scroll is actually replacing the arrows that are usually in the eagle's left claw.
In the first Il mistero dei Templari (2004) film, Ben's grandfather John Adams Gates tells Ben that Charles Carroll gave the Charlotte clue to "my grandfather's grandfather, Thomas Gates" in 1832. This means there are five generations of Gates's between Thomas and Ben. However, in the second film, Thomas Gates is shown in 1865 to have a son, Charles, whom Patrick Gates (Ben's father) says is his grandfather - which means Thomas Gates was really only John Gates's grandfather, not his grandfather's grandfather. Even considering there may have been two Thomases in the Gates family tree (the one shown in the first movie and the one in the second), the situation is unrealistic; to satisfy John Gates's historical description, both the first Thomas Gates, his son, and the second Thomas Gates would have had to have their first child at age eleven.
The President tells Ben that he majored in Architectural History at Yale. Yale does not offer a degree in Architectural History.