Timecop (1994)

3 continuity mistakes

★★★☆☆

Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce McGill, Ron Silver, Mia Sara

Continuity mistake: When Atwood is sent back and continues his fall, he lands on a black police car with his head and body lying on the bonnet face down. From the overhead shot his body has completely disappeared, as he was wearing a light grey suit which would stand out on the black car.

Continuity mistake: At the end when they are hanging from the roof, the bad guy gets shot and falls off and Walker climbs back onto the roof. He then turns the light off on top of the gun, but when he walks away the light is back on.

Continuity mistake: At the end when they are fighting at the house, future Walker's hair keeps changing between wet and dry throughout the whole scene.

More for Timecop

Mistakes

Factual error: We're told they carbon dated the gold to determine its age. Problem is, the gold hasn't aged by the normal processs - as it's been brought forward in time it will appear to be extremely new. As such carbon dating wouldn't work. Also, carbon dating only works on things that were alive and absorbed carbon-14; gold, having never been alive, could not be dated this way.

Jon Sandys ★

More mistakes in Timecop

Quotes

McComb: When I'm in office it's going to be just like the 80's. The top 10% will get richer and the other 90% can emigrate to Mexico where they can get a better life.

More quotes from Timecop

Questions

Question: How can their house still be standing in 2004 when it was destroyed in 1994? Even if they rebuilt it it wouldn't look s old, it would only be a few years old.

Answer: The explosion did not happen because, by killing the younger McComb, Max prevented the timeline in which McComb planted the bomb. In the new timeline, Senator McComb mysteriously disappeared 10 years ago and was never heard from again.

Answer: In one of the flashbacks, it is shown that the wife designed the house and had been thinking about it for a long time. I think the easiest answer to this is: the house was simply rebuilt the same as it was.

oldbaldyone

Answer: My understanding was the timeline had been reset in such a way that the explosion had never happened.

raywest ★

Except that the explosion did happen. When Max carries Melissa out of the house to prevent her death again, their house is exploding in the background. This is because McComb had placed a bomb in the house to ensure that the explosion would kill Max which of course had ultimately failed.

The explosion happened, but it was before Max returned to his own time in the future. Once he went back through the time portal, everything somehow reset itself to before the bomb being detonated. The previous events in the past were erased in favor of an alternate timeline. The movie does not attempt to give a logical explanation, and it makes no sense, as most time-travel stories never do, but a "suspension of disbelief" is employed here. We're supposed to accept that it happened. Max is the only character who knows what the previous timeline was like, but he now has no idea of current events (like his wife and son being alive) in his alternate life during the intervening time from when he was in the past and returns to the "new" present.

raywest ★