Box Office Bomb: Not in the sense that the film completely crashed and burned, but its $71 million gross wasn't enough to cover its $60 million budget.
Reality Subtext: Ambassador Mourain's office prominently featuring photographs of the then-President and Vice-President, Bill Clinton and Al Gore respectively. It's likely that this was included as an in-joke, as Gore and Tommy Lee Jones were college class-mates.
Technology Marches On: Part of the plotline involves Sokal destroying the only VHS tape that proved that the crowd was armed. Nowadays CCTV systems typically record to hard drives — and in the case of a US embassy, copies of the footage would almost certainly be uploaded to a remote server, meaning that Sokal would have a much harder job of covering his tracks if he wanted to delete the footage.
What Could Have Been: In the original cut, it was left ambiguous whether or not the crowd truly was armed, albeit circumstantial evidence (mostly the number of bullet holes in the building) suggested it was. Test audiences were left confused by what was meant to have actually happened, leading to heavy reshoots which definitively established that the crowd was armed, and that the State Department destroyed the evidence proving it.
