When Danny is talking to Maddy at night and drinking out of the plastic jug he hands it to her with the cap off, yet when he hands it to Maddy, the red lid is screwed on.
When Archer is talking to Maddy before leaving with the group of journalists, he puts his hand on her right shoulder and she shakes his hand off of her left shoulder in the next shot.
When Archer gives Solomon Maddy's business card it is tattered enough to fold in half. In the shot showing Solomon receiving the card from Archer it isn't folded anymore.
When RUF raids Solomon Vandy's village, RUF soldiers start chopping people's hands. At this scene, the RUF commander shoots a person who tries to run. After that, he explains their motive to the second person. At this time he has a sword in his right hand and a book in his left. From the back camera, the sword is in the left hand, and the book is absent. Also from this point, the book goes in and out of the commander's pocket every now and then till the next scene.
When Solomon meets up with his family in London, Dia stops and stands several feet away from Solomon, but in the next shot, Dia is close enough that Solomon can put his arm out to reach him.
Towards the end Archer is making a call on a satellite phone. He is holding and moving it around like a normal cell phone, while satellite phones need to be pointed with the antenna towards the approximate satellite location in the sky.
When Danny tells Maddy the "story", he, among other things, says: "By the time they get to India... they become like any other diamonds". India and Indonesia specialize on the smallest diamonds only, while the diamonds shown in the film are way beyond their "preferred" size - each diamond shown is at least 10 carats.
The mercenary intervention in the Sierra Leone civil war (Executives Outcomes PMC) began in May, 1995 and ended in January, 1997. They were long since gone by the time of the RUF invasion of Freetown in January 1999 when the movie is set. It was actually a combination of British and UN troops who brought the war to an end in 2001. Possibly made deliberately to avoid associating EO with the fictional mercenaries, whose activities were much more sinister.
When Danny tells Maddy the "story", he, among other things, says: "By the time they get to India... they become like any other diamonds". Two goofs in one. First - diamonds cannot "become like any other diamonds". Crystal structure, color, shape - any diamondeer can tell where the diamonds come from. And second - India and Indonesia specialize on the smallest diamonds only, while the diamonds shown in the film are way beyond their "preferred" size - each diamond shown is at least 10 carats.
Satellite phones have an inherent delay between the parties, due to the distance of the satellite from Earth. When Danny calls Maddy with a satellite phone, there are no delays in their conversation.
In the scene where the mercenaries take away the child in their truck, as the boy reaches outward for his mother you can see his arm knock the magazine from the left soldiers AK-47 assault rifle, which subsequently flies off-screen.
On the subtitles of the film they refer to "Foday Sankoh" as "Poppy Sankoh".
An arrival scene at Cape Town International Airport shows yellow posters in the background advertising 3G video cellphones. Such technology was definitely not on the market when the story was set.
In the G-8 Conference on Diamonds,Belgium shown in the beginning, most of the participants are seen using modern day laptops. Also shown are modern day LCD monitors which were not in market during the late 1990s when the film is supposed to take place.
In the scene in Kono, one of the child soldiers is seen with a Game Boy Advance SP, which was released in 2003.
The GPS unit that Archer has in his hand while calling for the air strike is from the Garmin GPSMAP 60 series, which was first introduced in mid-2004.
When making the call towards the end of the movie, Danny Archer uses a Telit Globalstar SAT 550 phone. Globalstar satellite services only started commercial operation in 2000, later than the movie's setting. Also, due to the technical background, Globalstar is not particularly useful in Africa.
Maddy uses a Leica 35mm M6 rangefinder camera with a Leica Summicron 35mm f/2 lens. When she shoots, the soundtrack clearly uses a Single Lens Reflex (SLR) noise. The distinctive sound is because a mirror is tripped when an SLR takes a picture. The Leica M6 has a cloth shutter and makes a very different and quieter noise.
A Mil-8 helicopter flies over Danny and Solomon. The sound is definitely not one of the Mil-8.
When Solomon enters the rebel camp to find Dia, Archer, armed with a Kalashnikov taken from a sentry, moves into position to cover him. Once in a position with cover, his rifle is heard cocking, yet his hands do not move.
During the attack by the Sierra Leone government troops on the mining camp, a rebel is seen firing a Kalashnikov rifle, but the sound is clearly that of an M16.
As Archer draws his pistol, the sound of the hammer cocking is heard, yet when shown from the side, the hammer is at rest.
The GPS coordinates of the rebel camp that Danny Archer gave when he called in the air strike puts the camp somewhere in the southeastern Sudan, near the Ethiopian border - on the other side of the African continent from Sierra Leone.
Throughout the movie, the vehicles are driven on the left side of the road. Sierra Leone drives on the right, while filming locations South Africa and Mozambique drive on the left.
When the sun is seen rising over Freetown, it rises over the ocean. Freetown is in Western Africa, where the sun rises over the continent to the east.
Cheetahs aren't native to Sierra Leone nor any of its neighboring countries.
Despite the location filming in Africa, several North American birdsongs can be recognized in the soundtrack, including Downy Woodpecker, Black-throated Green Warbler and Eastern Wood Pewee.
In the beginning of the film, Danny Archer gets arrested by Liberian border guards while crossing the border from Sierra Leone to Liberia. He would therefore end up in a prison in Liberia and not in Sierra Leone where he meets Solomon.
It is very unlikely that a huge multinational corporation big enough to be invited to G8 meeting, will want to bother over one diamond, even a big one. They make most of their produce from mêlée - medium sized diamonds between 0.5 and 2 carats.
The Colonel states that he has been given diamond mine concessions as payment for his mercenary services, therefore there is no reason for him to chase one diamond, albeit a large one.
In the scene where Archer is talking to Maddy about what the word is the Shona people had for him, he says they called him "Mukiwa", which is Ndebele - the Shona word would be "Murungu".
During the movie, Danny states that he fought in the Rhodesian Bush War, and later that he's 31. As the film is set in 1999 that would make Danny's year of birth at 1968. As the Bush War ended in 1979, Danny would have been about 10 or 11 while fighting, making his involvement in the Bush War implausible.
At "G8 Conference" scene an official says that people in Africa have died over "ivory, rubber, gold, oil and it's now true of diamonds". Oil is produced in very small amounts and never been a matter of any wars. Diamonds haven't caused much war in South Africa and Botswana since the end of 19th century. And civil war in Sierra Leone wasn't over diamonds. Diamonds were used to finance it, though.
In the Freetown prison, there is a tattoo on Danny Archer's right shoulder of the SADF 32 Battalion's badge. While it has the Cape Buffalo and two crossed arrows, the two scrolls with the battalion's motto - "Proelio Procusi" - are missing. The arrows are also misplaced. In the tattoo, the arrowheads are directly underneath the tips of the buffalo's ears, while the actual badge had the heads directly under the bases of the ears, where the ears met the animal's head. The arrows were placed where the scrolls should have been.
American Actor Leonardo DiCaprio's Zimbabwean accent sounds forced and unnatural.