Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol goofs

(at around 1 hour 30 minutes) While they are on the outside of the private jet en route to Mumbai, the engine is audible at idle. In the final shot of the sequence the sound shifts to the engine increasing thrust; however, the fan blades are clearly stationary and not rotating, so the engine is not running and could not be producing that noise.

At approximately 1:37:45 the audio has Ethan Hunt saying "Get us that code!". On screen, however, he is plainly saying something different.

(at around 1h 45 mins) When Ethan Hunt asks Benji Dunn to "pinpoint Hendricks's location", Benji replies "Hendricks is signalling from a state-run television station". However, earlier we saw Hendricks had entered the "Sun TV Network" station, which is a privately owned television network.

During the IMF team's visit to a party hosted by a wealthy Indian, they refer to one another using planet-based code names. When the situation turns tense, they abandon the aliases and call each other by their real names.

Ethan's breakout occurs in the dead of night with all the prisoners asleep, yet after he and Bogdan are rescued they are shown in a van in broad daylight.

(at about the 57-minute mark) While Hunt and his team are inside the hotel at the Burj Khalifa, they watch a sandstorm approaching from the front of the building; however, when Hunt and Wistrom leave via the front entrance (around the 1 hour 16-minute mark), the storm hits the building from the rear.

(at about the 18-minute mark) Ethan Hunt is handed a forged identity card that grants him access to the Kremlin. When he first examines it, the name printed on the card reads "Fedorov". At the Kremlin checkpoint the officer struggles to locate the record in the system; when he finally does, the entry appears as "Samokhvalov" (displayed in Russian).

(at around 1h 21 mins) Wistrom and Hunt's car crashes on a raised bend of an overpass, yet just seconds later it is shown on a ground-level, open motorway.

(at around 1 hour 30 minutes) When they're outside the private aircraft bound for Mumbai, the windows are round, like those on a boat. When they're inside the aircraft, the windows are large and square.

Towards the end, Luther is introduced to agents Foster, Dunn and Brandt, although he already knew Dunn from the previous film, Mission: Impossible III.

(at around 57 mins) Whilst Ethan is clinging to the exterior of the hotel, he spots a huge sandstorm approaching, its image reflected in the hotel's windows. A few shots later the windows still show the reflection, yet the storm itself is no longer visible.

(at around 59 minutes) At the end of the tower-climbing sequence, Ethan Hunt plants his hand firmly to gain leverage for kicking the window open. As the shot alternates between exterior and interior views, his hand moves from directly on the crack to just above it.

After Ethan turns his dark green officer's coat inside-out to serve as a winter coat after escaping the Kremlin, the inner lining in the same shot still displays the original characteristics of the officer's garment. However, when the camera cuts to a close-up and then back to a wide shot, the lining has changed to a grey, insulated material, indicating a different coat.

At the start we see Sabine Moreau fire three times at IMF agent Hanaway as she approaches him while he is walking along a lane. She then stoops to collect his parcel and, to be certain, fires two further shots. Later, in a van after the prison escape, agent Jane Carter explains to Ethan Hunt why Hanaway is absent and they play the footage back. In the playback the villainous Sabine Moreau again fires three shots at Hanaway, but when she bends to retrieve his parcel she does not discharge the extra two rounds.

At approximately the 12-minute mark, when Carter and Hunt are sitting in the van and Carter brings Hunt up to speed about what happened to their colleague in Budapest, some shots of her reveal a silver reading lamp appearing from the top-right of the frame, yet several other shots do not show this lamp despite the camera angle remaining largely unchanged.

When Benji walks into the hotel room pretending to be a room‑service attendant, he clearly needs both hands to open the door and manoeuvre the trolley. In the next scene, however, he is shown wearing only a single prop arm.

During the Mumbai valet‑parking sequence, the order and placement of several parked cars shift between shots. The high‑angle shot shows a Ferrari Enzo, a Mercedes‑Benz SL 65 AMG Black and a Bugatti Veyron positioned in front of the landscaped area. In the subsequent moving‑camera shot, a fraction of a second later, those three cars appear to have been pushed forward and a McLaren F1 is now parked behind the Enzo.

While Ethan negotiates with the Russian trader over the satellite, the Russian man repeatedly alternates between leaning forward and standing up during their conversation.

After Jane ejects Sabine from the premises, Ethan departs to follow Wistrom (Hendricks). Despite this, there was no corpse, nor were any police officers, ambulances or crowds present to attend to it.

(at around the 53-minute mark) The crew's helicopter is briefly reflected in the building's windows as it passes over the Burj Khalifa.

At 1:33:40 there's a brief flash in the background inside the aeroplane.

When the film shifts to Mumbai, India, the language heard on screen is Kannada, whereas the city's predominant languages are Marathi and Hindi.

(at around 1 hr 35 mins) After the plane touches down, they are said to have arrived in Mumbai. When Ethan Hunt drives up to Brij Nath's house, the architecture and surroundings clearly appear Middle Eastern (most likely Dubai), not Indian.

It is not physically possible to get a nuclear submarine to launch a missile within the film’s depicted window of 30 seconds, nor even within a few minutes. This is because rapid communication with submerged submarines cannot be achieved. A submarine on deterrent patrol remains submerged at roughly 200 metres or deeper, where it can only be contacted by Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) signals, which allow data transmission at the rate of only a few characters per minute. Those signals are used to send a pre-arranged code group that orders the vessel to ascend to a considerably shallower depth so that faster communication methods can be employed. That change of depth alone takes tens of minutes.

(at around 1 hr 55 min) When Ethan gets into the car on the multi-storey car park lift, he presses "push to start". The vehicle is fitted with a proximity system. The key fob, known as a "prox", needs to be nearby for the car to start.

Ballistic missiles do not reignite their motors after they pass their highest point, hence the term "Ballistic". Every stage has burned through its propellant before the trajectory reaches its apex ('apogee'). Moreover, they are aimed much higher than the ground‑level detonation that is portrayed in the film.

(at about 1h 1 min) When Ethan flees the server room by descending the façade of the Burj Khalifa, he is shown using a technique called "Aussie rappelling". For this manoeuvre the belay device that the rope runs through should be positioned at the rear of the harness, not on the side as depicted in the film. If it were fitted to the side like that, you would descend with your side leading rather than face-first.

(at around 1h 24 mins) Ethan's iPhone 4 is shown as being on the AT&T network while he is in Dubai. In Dubai he would be roaming on the Etisalat network.

In the car park the car is driven out of a "shelf" and plummets straight forwards the entire way down. In reality, it ought to have rotated as it descended.

While Hendricks is viewing the television screens at the Sun TV station, one of them shows the Hindi phrase "Duniya aapki dahleez par", in which "Duniya" is spelt incorrectly.

Although only one side of the paper was being printed while the documents were in the briefcase, when Lisenker came to read them they were printed on both sides.

Near the end, when Brandt goes to switch the power on, the warning notices on the door are written in Kannada, even though the scene is set in Mumbai where the local language is Marathi.

(At around the 74-minute mark) Benji appears to address Sabine by her real name, saying "I can't see Lea, though." In fact he says "I can't see Leonid, though" because Wistrom had shot Leonid, the man who authenticated the codes, in the preceding scene.

The camera-projector concealing the Kremlin corridor is shown slowly adjusting its position to match the guards' line of sight via a motorised mechanical arm. After Benji almost gets discovered by inadvertently stepping in front of the camera, a tablet is shown displaying the message "render complete", which implies the camera was only necessary until the rendering took over — something Ethan demonstrates by wiping his arm in front of the device. Thus the rapid flickering of the projected image when more guards arrive later is entirely plausible, since the image is now produced by a render rather than by the mechanical arm moving quickly.

Despite scaling the exterior of a prominent hotel past numerous windows, no-one notices Ethan Hunt as he ascends or descends.

At the Burj Khalifa, Wistrom (Hendricks in disguise) takes Leonard Lisenker to authenticate the nuclear launch codes. He could only have authenticted them if he already knew the codes; if that were the case, there would be no reason to purchase them in the first place. He might simply have been there to confirm the formatting and that the paperwork looked in order, but if so the scrambled codes would still have worked.

The sole reason given for the team's entry into The Kremlin is to identify Cobalt. However, later—when they match Cobalt to Kurt Hendricks from Ethan's sketch in the IMF Secretary's car—the Secretary immediately hands Ethan a data file on Hendricks (which Ethan later shows the rest of the team in the railway carriage). If Cobalt's identity is already known, there is no justification for sending the team into The Kremlin in the first place. In fact, when Ethan accepts the mission the stated purpose of the Kremlin operation is to reach Cobalt's file before he can destroy it, not to establish who he is.

The IMF team alters the hotel room numbers to intervene in an exchange of codes for diamonds. The rooms are actually situated on different floors. As Winstroms ascends, he would have stepped out on the correct floor rather than the one where the IMF team was poised to intercept the exchange.

(at around 1h 13 mins) After the diamonds are exchanged for the launch codes, just before Jane Carter catches up with Sabine Moreau, Moreau, growing impatient, presses the lift button; the force of her presses makes the whole wall shake, revealing it to be a set. Meanwhile Wistrom is in another lift that has been stopped by Benji, and when he pushes a button to try to get it moving again the entire control panel sinks, not just the single button.

(at around 1h 49 mins) The nuclear launch device used by Hendricks has an incomplete Russian keyboard — it is missing four characters normally located on the right-hand side of a QWERTY keyboard: the left square bracket, right square bracket, typewriter apostrophe and slash — and the user interface is badly translated: the title (the inscription above the code) should read "Kod podtverzhdenia", not "Udostoveritelnyj kod" (the word "Udostoveritelnyj" does not exist in Russian, although it contains some recognisable Russian elements). There is also an untranslated word ("dismantled") and the syntax is appalling. (A little earlier in the film the UI in English is shown, but that is Benji's device, not Hendricks'.)

Around the 53-minute mark, as Ethan approaches Dubai by road he is driving on the right-hand side; however, when they reach the Burj a panoramic view of Dubai shows traffic travelling on the left.

(at around 1h 55 mins) A blatantly fake dummy is visible when a character falls in the multi-storey car park.

One of the characters is shown on multiple occasions using a MacBook Air. Although the character is actively working on the device, the Apple logo on the lid remains unlit. In normal use of a MacBook Air, the logo would typically be illuminated.

When Ethan Hunt and Brandt board the goods wagon in Moscow, its interior is plainly far too wide for that particular vehicle.

As Brandt prepares to make the leap, Ethan is micro-managing him, instructing Brandt when to jump and alternating between keeping a finger in his ear and holding the mobile between cuts. In addition, he is in a crowded room shouting "jump", which would almost certainly draw the attention of the guests nearby.

In the car park scene, several US-spec cars are visible (with orange markers in their headlamps). There are also a few Mitsuoka Viewt's — the classic-styled versions of the Nissan March — which were sold only in Japan. They can also be seen earlier in the street scene, where a Nissan S-Cargo and a Figaro appear; both models were sold exclusively in Japan.

As Winstrom descends the Burj Khalifa in a lift, Benji delays him by stopping it at the wrong levels. When he presses the panel for the ground floor, the entire control panel is clearly seen shifting and bending.