Continuity mistake: When Mary Steenbergen and Malcolm MacDowell are in a restaurant and he's eating ice cream, his hand holding the ice cream spoon is in a different position when he's shown from the front than from when he's shown from the back - one way it's up, the other it's down. Also, the spoon disappears whenever the shot is from the back.
Time After Time (1979)
1 continuity mistake - chronological order
Directed by: Nicholas Meyer
Starring: Mary Steenburgen, Malcolm McDowell, David Warner, Charles Cioffi
Audio problem: When Wells is en route to the Hyatt, exhaust sound from the taxi as it descends the hills of San Francisco seems to have been stolen from the Mustang in "Bullet." When the taxi pulls up in front of the hotel, it sounds again like the ordinary taxi that pulled away with Wells earlier.
H.G. Wells: Do you still insist that this is all poppycock?
Amy Robbins: That's not exactly the word I had in mind.
Trivia: All three of the children of the real H.G. Wells were still alive at the time of this film's release.
Question: Excluding plot convenience and suspension of disbelief, how could the time machine be shipped to San Francisco when H.G. Wells was traveling into the future with it?
Answer: In the late 1970s, Wells' time machine and other belongings were sent to San Francisco as part of an H.G. Wells exhibit at a museum. It had been found two years earlier, buried under Wells' since-demolished London house. It was considered a non-working "curiosity" that Wells built and had inspired his novel, "The Time Machine." In the 19th century, when Wells chased Jack the Ripper into the future, that is where his time machine landed, apparently drawn to its 1979 counterpart in San Francisco. At the end, Wells returned to 19th-century London in the time machine, where it would eventually be found many decades later. And sorry, but there has to be some "suspension of disbelief" to explain the time travel.
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Answer: At the end of the movie, he said that he was going to dismantle the time machine, so it's not used again, thus ending this timeline and the timeline we know as H.G. Wells would come to pass. As for the time machine being in San Francisco, if the machine had never been moved or buried, he would have landed in London.