Goofs for
Empire of the Sun (1987)

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• Continuity: A girl in the background puts on her dress twice as Basie and Jim walk through the holding camp.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In the Shanghai street battle scene, some business signs contained names Romanized with Pinyin instead of the Wade-Giles or traditional systems that would have been used at the time.
  
  
• Anachronisms: In the chaotic street scene where Jim is chased by an older ruffian, they pass a posted bill advertising the movie Gone with the Wind (1939). While the movie did premiere in 1939, that particular and most famous poster did not appear until 1967, during its re-release.
  
  

• Continuity: When Jim first comes into the cabin of the derelict freighter to meet Bassy, the fried rice which Bassy is stirring contains something which looks like meat. Later shots of the pan and then the served meal show rice only.
  
  
• Continuity: When Jim steals the cork from the bottle during his Latin lesson, he sets the bottle to his right. When he leaves, after snatching his lesson book from the doctor, the bottle is to the far left of the table.
  
  
• Continuity: In an early scene where Jamie's mother is sitting on the foot of his bed, she lights a cigarette. When she stands to exit the room, the cigarette has disappeared.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the very last shot of Jim's suitcase floating in the river, a rope can be seen tied to the top right corner of the case, leading off the right side of the screen, keeping the suitcase from drifting out of the shot.
  
  
• Continuity: When the truck leaves the hangar for the Suchow Internment camp, it does not have a frame for the rear covering. When they arrive at Suchow, the frame is clearly present.
  
  
• Continuity: While Jim is on top of the tower cheering on the P-51 pilots, a plane does a bomb run on a hangar nearby. The pilot dropped the bombs too early and one can be seen skipping on the ground. In the next shot of the hangar exploding, the plane is no longer visible.
  
  
• Continuity: When Jim is being driven through the city at the beginning and sees the beggar, his window is up on the shots from outside the car. Shots inside the car show his window halfway down.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: In the scene where the P-51D pilot waves at Jim, just before the close-up of the pilot, a white Range Rover can be seen parked on the airfield as the Mustang passes.
  
  
• Anachronisms: The model airplanes that Jim set on fire are plastic models by AURORA. These models were not released until 1957, some 16 years after the story takes place.
  
  
• Anachronisms: The British ship in the harbor that Jim signals is a class of destroyer that were launched in the mid 1950s, some 14 years after the film takes place.
  
  
• Factual errors: Jim could not have witnessed the atomic bomb explosion in Japan with anything approaching the detail shown in the film. The distance from the Chinese mainland to Nagasaki, at its nearest point (roughly 475 miles), is further than the distance from the Trinity test site in New Mexico to Denver, Colorado (roughly 450 miles.) The distance from mainland China to Hiroshima is even further (roughly 640 miles.) Even allowing for no terrain obstacles, the curvature of the earth at such a distance precludes anything more than a brief dim glow on the horizon.
  
  
• Continuity: As Jamie races after the truck filled with British citizens, the little boy standing in the back of the truck stares at him with his mouth alternately opened or closed, depending on whether the shot is from further away or close up.
  
  

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