The Time Traveler's Wife

Continuity mistake: Claire sits on a blanket and empties a bag of stuff on it. Then it seems empty when she takes it from the ground to hand it over to Henry. The stuff would have sounded and the blanket is to light when she takes it from the ground to hand it over to Henry.

MiKeMaN_SE

Other mistake: Shortly after the start of the movie, when Eric Bana's character reappears in the library and starts to put his clothes back on, his pants are already undone. If he had suddenly vanished from the library, then his pants should not be undone (unless, of course, he was up to no good just as he vanished).

Factual error: When Henry travels back to when his mother is still alive and is riding the el train with her, when he gets off the train downtown there are color coded signs on the platform. Specifically, a brown and purple sign indicating that those color trains stop on that side of the platform. This scene took place sometime in the 1970s since his mother was still alive, but el trains were not color coded until 1993.

More mistakes in The Time Traveler's Wife

Clare Abshire: I wouldn't change one second of our life together.

Question: Why can't Henry save his mother from being in the car crash? Couldn't he have warned her when they met on the subway?

Answer: He could have had Claire distract her long enough to delay her car ride and miss the accident.

Answer: Of course not. Why would she listen to him? He's a total stranger. And if he tells her he's her time-travelling son, she'll think he's a nutjob to boot. It's well-established in the book that he tried everything to save her but could never do so, which made him recognise a well-accepted convention of time-travelling lore: big past events can never be changed. Diana Gabaldon wrote an excellent and extensive essay on time-travelling laws, which is probably still available somewhere on the Internet.

Sereenie

Question: There's a scene in which, right after they've bought their house, Henry appears in their living room, naked and shot. I just don't see how this can happen because this would constitute a travel within a travel. That is, he travels to where he gets shot. Shot, he then travels to the newly-bought house; then finally travels back to the Christmas party from whence he came originally, where he finally dies. But the movie never establishes this sort of "Inception"-like travel. He always travels to one time, then comes back. Is this something that the book clarifies, or is it a mistake from the movie?

Answer: Since no rules are ever firmly established in the film, there's no reason he couldn't have done this. So it's not a movie mistake. The book addresses the nature of his travel a little more in-depth, and even there this would not have been impossible.

Phixius Premium member

Question: Henry gets shot and when he time travels, he dies in Clare's arms. Years later, Henry appears to both Clare and Alba. So is he still time traveling or is he really dead?

Answer: He's really dead. But while he was alive, he time-traveled far into the future and saw Clare and Alba. His "individual timeline" is scattered, out of chronological order, all over the "real timeline, " so he can appear in the "future" as a younger (or, in this case, living) person.

More questions & answers from The Time Traveler's Wife

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