Time After Time

Plot hole: When Jack The Ripper checks his watch before confronting H.G. Wells and demanding the key, the hands point to 8:50, the ensuing chase to the museum and demise of the Ripper may have used up a half hour or so, yet the time on the wall clock indicates that it is midnight.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: Movie time and real time don't match, so 3 hours has passed without all 3 hours being shown. The fact that the clock now shows midnight is meant to explain this fact without the need for subtitles to reveal the time.

Bishop73

Plot hole: Wells says, "We're too late to prevent the murder of number 3..." He's too brilliant a person to not think of the obvious fallacy of that: possessing a time machine inherently means that you can never be "too late" for anything. He can easily travel back in time to try to prevent any of the murders. And he believes he can change the past because he immediately starts plotting to prevent a murder that a future news story reported. This contradiction obviously serves merely to further the plot. (01:25:00)

ReRyRo

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.

More mistakes in Time After Time

Jack the Ripper: It's catching isn't it, violence.

More quotes from Time After Time

Trivia: All three of the children of the real H.G. Wells were still alive at the time of this film's release.

More trivia for Time After Time

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: 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.

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.

raywest

More questions & answers from Time After Time