Headscratchers / Argo

• In the climax of the movie, why didn't the Revolutionary Guard order the plane to land after they'd missed stopping it on the ground? It was still in Iranian airspace (it would take at least half an hour for the plane to reach the Turkish or Iraqi border after takeoff), and a civilian Swiss pilot wouldn't have much reason to refuse the request.
  • Cause in real life, it did not happen like that.
    • The entire being-chased-by-the-guards aspect is fictional, of course. But in the film universe, why didn't the Guards think of stopping the plane?
    • They ran into the tower with the apparent intent of doing exactly that. But much like their pursuit on the ground, they were too late.
    • The guards may not have been too keen on broadcasting their failings to their superiors. Plus the new regime may not be too keen on creating a diplomatic incident with the Swiss who have much of the Shah's oil wealth deposited in their bank vaults.
• Given that the six Americans were going to be masquerading as Canadians, why was there never any discussion of whether any of them spoke French? If Mendez could warn one of them of such an obscure detail as to pronounce "Toronto" as "Torono", as "Canadians don't pronounce the "t", and yes, they'll find someone who knows that", why he wasn't he worried that the guards might find it extremely suspicious that none of these people spoke a lick of one of their country's official languages? Even those from "English" Canada ought to know a smattering of French.
  • Lots of Anglophone Canadians speak no French.
  • Fair enough, but it would still be odd that none of the six did, especially since at least one's cover identity was that of someone from Quebec—where French is practically the only language.
  • Montreal especially has a large anglophone community. Francophones are a vast minority of Canada's population, and if someone is living in Quebec, it doesn't mean they were born there, or that they speak French either way. Put another way, finding six Canadians of the 30 million or so alive in 1979 that don't speak French would be ordinary, not unusual.
• At the second checkpoint, the guard questions the first American when his arrival form is missing but doesn't become suspicious when a string of five North Americans travelling together have all had their arrival forms "lost".
  • It's not entirely unreasonable for the guard to not be overly suspicious; if a group of 5 travelers who all stated they arrived together all had missing forms, then it's entirely possible that whoever was at the desk when they came through simply mis-filed them all. It would have been way more suspicious if they had all claimed to arrive at different times but all showed up together and all conveniently had missing forms. In any event they also produce a document from the Iranian Ministry of Culture, which shows that the government is clearly aware of their presence there.
  • Better still clerks in that kind of position, in any country, are underpaid are expected to do many, many things at once with limited resources. They fit the trope of the Beleaguered Bureaucrat so if 5 tourists show up who are looking to leave anyway - which means they cannot cause anymore trouble - any Iranian clerk who is not ideologically fanatical would not care that the cards were lost or really exert themselves to find out when there is another set of people in the queue right behind them who need to be processed.

---