The Time Machine

Corrected entry: When Alexander goes into the ground to get the girl taken by the other species, he sees her top in a pile of clothes next to the butcher table. Later when he sees her in the cage she is naked from behind but when he helps her out of the cage after he kills the leader she is wearing that same top.

Correction: Alexander didn't see her top, he saw a piece of her jewelry.

Corrected entry: When Alexander meets the computer (Orlando Jones) in the New York Library at the first stop he makes in the future, Jones can only be seen through the glass. When he is walking between glasses, he disappears. When Alex travels 800,000 years into the future he meets the same computer (in the now-destroyed library). But when Jones is telling him about his companion, who is now a skeleton, he reaches over to pat the skull. When he does, his hand travels outside the glass realm but is still visible.

Correction: If you look closely though you'll see that it's a cracked glass shield missing a piece in the middle and continuing on the other side(where the hand is projected).

Corrected entry: The little photo that Alexander has of Emma was in colour. Colour photography did not exist at the turn of the century.

Correction: It's not really a color photo. Until the 50s, painted pictures were very popular.

Corrected entry: Watch when Emma is struck by the carriage. The carriage actually passes right by her, leaving her standing. the scene then cuts to Alexander, after which we hear Emma's scream. The carriage should be about 15 - 20 feet past her by this time.

Correction: The first carriage doesn't hit her, it just passes her. You can see the other one actually going right towards her, that's the one that hits her.

Corrected entry: When Alexander goes into the future and meets Samantha Mumba, she says that almost everyone forgets the stone language. If most forget and the others can only remember by reading random words on tablets, then who teaches the children to speak it perfectly?

Correction: She states herself that she is a teacher of the language, that she teaches it to the children.

Corrected entry: In 2020 they talk about the first 20-megaton explosion to create the lunar colony. Then we find out that these blasts have knocked the moon off its orbit causing it to break up. However even a single moderately sized crater on the moon would have been created by a blast an order of magnitude greater then this. How could such small blasts knock the moon out of its orbit while countless meteor impacts have had no effect?

Correction: For the moon to be knocked out of orbit, an object the same size and density would have to strike the moon and at relatively the same speed in the opposite direction. Even if the largest asteroid in our solar system struck the moon (Ceres which is almost 600 miles wide), the moon wouldn't be knocked out of orbit or even destroyed. As to all the comments about mining the moon to reduce its mass, even with unknown future technology, it's a ridiculous assumption. To reduce the mass of the moon by 100th of 1% (0.01%) you would have to remove about 7.35 quadrillion tons, so not trillions. A 1% reduction in mass would require 7.35 sextillion tons removed (not that a 1% reduction in mass would result in the moon being knocked out of orbit), which is over a quintillion tons a day for 7 years straight (1,000 mining facilities each mining out 30 billion tons a second, and currently we don't even mine 16 billion tons on Earth in one year). And a lighter moon would cause the moon to be pulled closer to Earth, not further away. Certainly a movie set in the future can have moon be out of orbit without creating a mistake. But to claim it was from blasting from 20-megaton explosions and mining isn't plausible due to the sheer size of the moon. Remember, the moon is bigger than Pluto.

Bishop73

Correction: All we hear is that the FIRST blast was a 20-megaton explosion, and then later, that the attempts to colonize the moon had knocked it out of orbit. We have NO idea what went on between the year 2030 and 2037, and to say that the moon's orbit was disrupted by 20-megaton blasts is an assumption, nothing more.

Twotall

Its impossible. A bomb 10,000 times the strength wouldn't do a damn thing to the moon. Not even hundreds of them.

lionhead

Correction: The mention of "blasting" was associated with lunar mining. Presumably, much of the mined lunar material was being freighted away from the Moon (perhaps and probably back to Earth, but also to other destinations), thereby depleting the Moon's mass over time. We know today that the Moon is gradually moving away from the Earth already under its current mass. Removing the Moon's mass gradually would affect its gravitational relationship to the Earth, eventually leading to the Moon's breakup due to gravitational tidal forces. The "blasting" would have only been the beginning of the calamity.

Charles Austin Miller

Sounds ridiculous. Got any idea how much mass they would need to remove from the moon before it would actually affect its orbit? trillions of tons. You need such a big operation of constant removal of huge amounts of material from the moon, for centuries. Not likely. Also, the craters on the moon are caused by meteorites that slammed into it with the power of hundreds if not thousands of megatons of TNT, for billions of years.

lionhead

Why ridiculous? You have no idea how much material was removed, nor do you have any idea what a future civilization is capable of removing.

Charles Austin Miller

They would have to be removing trillions of tons of material from the moon for decades. In 7 years you can't remove enough mass from the moon to affect its orbit causing it to break up, not unless you have Superman doing the work.

lionhead

Again, you have no idea of a future civilization's mining capabilities.

Charles Austin Miller

Corrected entry: When Alexander is leaving the hologram thingy in Future New York, the hologram says 'live long and prosper' he then walks off to the right...and you can hear a sound effect, exactly like the doors make on Star Trek, as he walks off the holographic glass.

Correction: This isn't really trivia, as the hologram uses the saying, hand gesture, and sound effect to mock Alexander.

Corrected entry: The lighting switches on the walls in Alexander's home are connected using surface mounted pin and post wiring. There are no wires visible running to the light fixtures.

Correction: Alexander is a brilliant inventor. It would be easy (and better looking) for him to run the wires inside the walls.

Corrected entry: The holographic librarian's room in the year 800,000 still has some books on the verge of dissolving, some glass-like panes, etc. How? After a gigantic period of 800,000 years, almost nothing man-made could have possibly survived. Just think of all the earthquakes, nearby meteor hits, rains, radiation bombardment, etc.

Correction: The holographic librarian comes from our future, so who knows what materials have been invented between now and then (obviously new technology is being invented, as the librarian exists). Remember there's technology around today that people thought couldn't possibly exist.

Corrected entry: When Alexander goes to the year 802,701, the level of water had dropped about 30 metres. As that the climate seems to be tropical, the polar ice would have melted down and the water level would be higher than what it is in today's New York.

Dr Wilson

Correction: Being that the Moon was destroyed hundreds of thousands of years prior to that time, that could have had a major effect on the planet. In addition to the fact that tides would pretty much disappear, there is also a theory saying that without the Moon, the Earth's tilt can gradually be altered over time which would change the position of the poles. Also, 800,000 years worth of continental drift might have moved the former New York further from the poles than where is now.

AD

Corrected entry: The light bulbs in Alexander's laboratory are frosted. Frosted bulbs were not invented until later. The bulbs should be clear with the filaments visible for that period.

Correction: A man who invents a time machine without claiming credit, publishing his design or registering a patent, for a time machine, can also similarly have other unknown, uncelebrated inventions. It is plausible to think that such a man can have invented a frosted light bulb for his own personal use, before they were invented and mass produced by another person.

Corrected entry: When Alexander travels into the future everything around him is moving at a fast pace but it is always daytime. Wouldn't the sunlight be flashing on and off really fast?

Correction: Yes and it does. A rapidly flashing light source (faster than about 10 flashes per second) appears as a continuous source due to persistence of vision. Incidentally, this is the very effect that makes motion pictures possible at all!

Oscar Bravo

Corrected entry: The design of Alexander's house makes no sense. From the front it almost looks like a firehouse. It is obvious his laboratory is a converted horse shed. (If you look closely, you can see the horse stalls in several shots.) However, attached to this is a large glass conservatory. No architect would have placed a conservatory, one of the more impressive spaces in a Victorian house, adjacent to a smelly, fly-infested horse shed. It does not appear to be an addition, since it has impressive columns and an arch that matches the front of the room. Also, the wall of the staircase going upstairs is lined with clocks, but their placement would make them almost impossible to wind unless he had invented a special ladder to access them.

Correction: These are all your opinions and assumptions. You don't KNOW the house used to be a horse shed, you don't KNOW the conservatory wasn't an addition, and you don't KNOW he didn't have a ladder to wind the clocks. No errors here.

Factual error: When Philby and Alexander are talking about Albert Einstein, Alexander mentions that Einstein is a patent clerk. The beginning of this movie takes place in the year 1899. Einstein was still in school and didn't become a patent clerk until 1902.

More mistakes in The Time Machine

Uber-Morlock: You built your time machine because of Emma's death. If she had lived, it would never have existed. So how could you use your machine to go back to save her?

More quotes from The Time Machine

Trivia: The director of the movie, Simon Wells, is the great grandson of H.G. Wells.

DenizenZERO

More trivia for The Time Machine

Question: When Alex went back in time why didn't we see his machine when 1899 Alex and Philby were talking in the lab?

Answer: He was only focused on saving his fiancée, he didn't think of anything else. If he did he would have thought about it.

More questions & answers from The Time Machine

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