When Alexander pushes his hand through the bubble surrounding his energized time machine, the scene shows his fingernails growing extremely long due to being exposed to accelerated time. A minute later when he shuts down the machine and starts walking around his surroundings, both hands are manicured, again.
When Alexander goes into the far future (635,427,810 AD), there are palms/ferns waving in the breeze behind him. When the camera angle changes to show us what he is witnessing, the whole area is void of vegetation. Even behind or next to the Time Machine.
In the opening scene, the contents of the blackboard change between shots.
The amount of geologic change that occurs in the movie over the span of 800,000 years is far too great for that passage of time. Glaciation and valley formation shown in the movie would take place over millions of years, not hundreds of thousands.
Actress Myndy Crist, who is the friendly New Yorker who thinks Alexander Hartdegen's Time Machine is a Cappuccino maker, is listed in the movie credits as "Jogger", but in the entire scene she is unlocking her bicycle from a bike rack, thus her credit should be "Bicyclist", since she isn't jogging anywhere in the film.
Universe conflict: In the Alexander Hartdegen universe, there is a Time Machine book by HG Wells author and a movie by George Pal, in both there are Elois and Morlocks. If book and movie are treated as sci fiction by Vox, it could not be possible to have also Elois and Morlocks in Hartdegen's universe.
It is impossible for the moon to remain in scattered fragments after such a long time as 800,000 years. By that time, gravity would have caused the fragments to fall back together into one contiguous moon or to form a ring around the Earth. However, the later shot of the moon in the far-flung future shows that it is continuing to fracture, indicating that the detonation that caused it to fragment in the first place was much deeper than simply a few stray fragments, and the stretching between the two time periods shows that the pieces are becoming the aforementioned ring.
A gentleman of the late Victorian era would not have hair as long as shown in the film.
However, we know from earlier scenes that Alexander is a rebel in his time and won't accept traditional clothing. Therefore, he could have long hair as a protest to these norms.
When Alexander is unconscious and traveling into the future, the dials on the time machine seem to be spinning at a rate of around one million years per second. He would have far surpassed the year 802,701. Adjacent dials in the row also spin at the same rate, instead of at a "sequential times ten" ratio, and the left-hand three dials never change, even though the dials directly to their right are spinning rapidly. This shows that the dials were made to just spin, rather than count.
When the camera tracks across and backwards from the city which is growing in time-lapse, aircraft are twice shown flying in real time, rather than time-lapse, across the city.
In the distant future where civilization has regressed to a primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle, Mara still keeps her armpits shaved.
At the very beginning of the movie, a clock on the wall strikes three o'clock. In the next scene, when Philby reminds Alexander of his date with Emma, Alexander asks what time it is with Philby responding that it's close to five o'clock.
When Alexander travels to the year 635,427,810, he witnesses a barren landscape littered with Morlock caves as far as the eye can see, and he sees what looks like humans, presumably the Eloi, being led away in chains by the Morlocks. In all of this time, it seems unbelievable that neither race would have evolved into other races, remaining the same, especially since humans had split into two races within just 800,000 years.
The crystal handle used to control the speed of the time machine uses a set screw which weren't invented until the early 1900's.
Despite the fact that in the sequence in which the camera zooms in on New York City, the buildings are being built or demolished quickly, and people and cars go at high speed, showing that the machine is traveling a year per second, when the camera shows the Earth, the planet's rotation is too slow, suggesting that the machine is instead traveling at one day per second.
With the New York Library being buried 800,000 years after Alexander visited it, there should be no way possible for Vox to still be operating.
In the Eloi's time, the ruins of the library still have clearly visible, sharply incised inscriptions. Such carvings erode significantly after several hundred, or at most, several thousand years; after 800,000 years they should have been illegible, due to erosion from rain or wind, or (if they had been buried) chemical reactions in the soil.
At the beginning of the film, which is set in 1899, Alex talks to Filby about his correspondence with patent clerk Albert Einstein. However, Einstein was still in school and did not become a patent clerk until 1902.
One of the pocket watches in Alex's collection was actually a Swiss made design that was not introduced until around 1920, and thus would not have been produced in 1899.
The motor-carriage that is seen outside the skating rink and later on the street by the flower shop, has current bicycle type tires (metal rims and spokes), most vehicles of the time had wooden rims and spokes, lined with rubber.
When Alexander arrives on the date of May 24th, 2030, he is seen watching the "Future is now" on a large screen. When he unravels the rope that lets the "step-down" stairs down, a man in a white shirt and blue jeans can be seen slightly behind the time machine for a brief second, then he vanishes back under the machine when Alexander is walking toward the screen.
As Alex exits the time machine at 26m 59s crew are visible as reflections in the copper pressure dome to the lower left of frame. In the very next shot, the reflection has been blurred-out.
Most, if not all of the structures built in New York City around Alexander's former home on East 60th street are not present during the zoom out section of the 1899-2030 time travel sequence. Some of these structures include the Plaza Hotel, The Metropolitan Club, The Pierre, Hotel Sherry-Netherland, Ritz Tower, and Rockefeller Center.
Almost all of the buildings and houses that appear in the sequence when the camera zooms from Alexander's former laboratory to outer space do not exist in real life.
Given that whole years pass in a matter of seconds from his perspective, Alexander shouldn't be able to see how the medallion falls to the ground in normal speed (nor hear the sound it makes when it impacts on the ground).
While we can only speculate about the imagined physics that allows the time machine to operate, we see that when the time traveller accidentally puts his hand outside the protection of his machine's 'force field' during travel to the future, the fingernails grow by at least five millimetres before he snatches his hand back in pain. This amount of growth indicates that his hand has experienced at least a month while outside the field. Since his blood vessels inside the field would only be supplying a few seconds worth of blood, his hand would be starved of oxygen and therefore dead and well into decomposition by the time he manages to get it back within the field. His only option would be immediate amputation to prevent gangrene in his arm.
Alexander finds Mara's clothes in the stack of discarded items in the Morlock lair, but when he finds her in the cage of the uber-Morlock, she is still wearing them.
The idea that modern humans would not have evolved at all in 800,000 years is laughable. Even in Wells' novella, the Eloi are described as short, squat, pink people with a fringe of blonde hair around their large, bald heads. Wells also writes that the Time Traveler views Weena as a pet to be taken care of; she is never his love interest.
When Alexander asks the VOX unit about time travel and it responds with information about various scientists, Alexander himself is one of them listed, and he asks VOX about Hartdegen's theory for time travel. VOX rejects the reality of time travel, but given that he is speaking to Alexander, a scientist who went missing in 1899 and has now mysteriously reappeared in 2030, and because he has information about Alexander including the photograph next to the description, he should piece this all together and realize that Alexander indeed traveled through time.
When the Vox says "Live long and prosper," it holds up its hand with the fingers in a "V" and the thumb next to the index finger. The Vulcan sign is properly done with the thumb away from the index finger so the hand makes more of a "W" shape. The salute is actually for the Hebrew letter Shin which has three points, not two. Leonard Nimoy (who is Jewish) saw the sign given during a Hebrew ritual and used it years later when an "exotic" sign was called for in his Star Trek (1966) role.