The top mistakes in The Time Machine http://www.moviemistakes.com/film1977 en Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:55:13 +0000 41227 When Alexander is travelling to the future for the first time, it shows a speedy acceleration of the events around him. However, the planes that are seen flying by are moving at normal speeds, or at least speeds way too slow since they should be moving too fast to even see, since skyscrapers are being built in a matter of seconds. 18244 During Alexander's long journey, it shows an elaborate geological sequence. It shows the area turning to desert and then trees and plants begin to grow. If you look at the background, trees grow up, then shrink in the same manner instead of dying and falling over. The special effects crew just reversed the growing sequence. 73112 When Alexander makes his first trip into the past, you can see the second hand of the pocket watch turning backward. The hand is jumping second by second. This is a mistake. A quartz watch (battery powered watch of our times) would do it this way, but a mechanical one from 1900 would turn backwards the same way it turns forward: 5 steps per second, which for the untrained eye looks like a smooth movement. 17679 In the middle of the movie, when Alexander is traveling through time and the landscape around him is evolving, the geologic sequence makes no sense. It shows sand and dust covering what was once New York, then water forming into a river and wearing down the gorge, and then a glacier covering the area. The glacier would have exerted hundreds of millions of tons of pressure on the land, smoothing out the gorge that had worn down through the sedimentary rock. The glacier would then have melted into the hollow it had formed, much like the Great Lakes. It would have made more sense for the glacier to have come first, then retreated and melted to form a river that carved out the gorge. 17675 The operation of the Time Machine has no continuity. In the beginning of the film, both when he goes backward and forward in time, Alexander has to activate the machine and it sort of warms up: The glass blades spin and open outward, the cones of light open up in sequence, and the light bubble slowly envelopes the machine. But when he is escaping the destruction of New York and when he fights with the Morlock, both times he just throws the lever forward and the machine speeds off with no preliminary activity.