Headscratchers / The Time Machine (2002)

• Why does Alexander make the time machine with year slots into the millions when he was just going back 4 years to save the woman he loved from dying?
  • He probably wanted to be extra prepared just in case he accidentally went too far ahead in time too fast... Which he ended up doing a few times. Running out of numbers on the display doesn't necessarily mean the machine stops traveling through time, especially if the machine is just controlled by a throttle. It's also likely he thought he might want to go that far forward at some point, after the business with his wife was sorted out.
  • Or the year-tallying display wasn't entirely custom-made by Alexander, but was something he'd adapted from another machine that happened to count up to very high numbers. He just added on the day and month wheels at the right end of the display.
• Unless Alex regularly works out every day as he painstakingly builds the time machine, how does he become physically adept enough to fight superhuman beasts by the time he goes to the year 802,701?
  • The Morlocks may be superhuman compared to the peaceful Eloi, but not to modern humans. Also, it's possible Alex was just reasonably athletic, of even tried working out in order to save his wife, given how he was originally stopping her from getting murdered.
• How does Vox's console withstand 800,000 years of wear and atmospheric change, yet still function without a power supply?
  • Perhaps it had backup batteries with excellent Ragnarök Proofing and really good power management, or some kind of solar recharging system that survived as well.
• What exactly does the Über Morlock mean when he says that he is the "inescapable result" of Alexander, a man who disappeared without any known descendants?
  • It's been some time since I've seen this movie, but he's likely speaking poetically of humanity in general, like many movie villains tend to do.
• How are the Morlocks still alive without their leader 600 MILLION YEARS in the future, when even he said they would die for lack of food "within months" if he didn't control their urges?
  • Well, apparently he was wrong and overestimated his own importance.
• Before facing off against the Morlocks in an epic battle, why doesn't Alexander at least return to his time to better prepare?
• If the Morlocks can no longer go in the sunlight, how come the raiding party took place in the middle of the day? The only explanation is that the Uber-Morlocks as albinos aren't capable of returning to the surface and they're keeping the other castes underground on purpose.
• He can't go back and save his girlfriend because then he'd have no reason to go back and save her. Then at the end of the film he goes to a bad future, then goes back in time and prevents it which he can do because... ?
  • He couldn't save his girlfriend because it would remove his reason for creating the time machine, but could stop that future from occurring because he was just observing it.
    • But remember that he wouldn't be able to observe it in the future if he prevented it from happening in the first place. The same effect, only the other way round.
    • Ah, but! Saving his fiancée in the past would be an action that affects his present. Observing one possible future where he is a temporal outsider, then going back a bit before that to change it is a different thing entirely. He can't change his past, but he can change the future. If his fiancée hadn't died, he wouldn't have built the time machine or used it like he did, so she would've died, so he would've saved her, so she would've died, and so on. Paradox. However, once he has access to the time machine he's free to travel to the future, see how it goes, then travel back and change it in whatever way he wishes so long as it doesn't affect anything that happened to him before he first turned on the time machine. Everything before he activated the time machine is immutable because if things were different, the time machine wouldn't have come to exist. Everything after that is free game because nothing in the future is essential to the creation and operation of the machine.
    • Yes but as demonstrated in Fantastic Four: The End if he rescued his wife BUT left his past self believing her dead he'd still build the time machine, rescue her, but avoid the paradox completely.
    • It could be possible that he just didn't think of that.
    • It still creates the exact same sort of paradox that saving Emma would have. By destroying the Morlocks he erases his reasons for destroying the Morlocks, just like how saving Emma would have erased his reason for saving Emma.
    • But, his reason for going forward in time and then back was to defeat the Uber-Morlock. He would then rescue his friend, escape and destroy the Morlock colony. No matter what the future looked like, his mind was already made up. In other words, the future he saw before going back and turning his time machine into a bomb was a future without him. He can't change his own personal past (saving Emma). But, like in Back to the Future, his own personal future hasn't been written yet, so he make his future whatever he wants to make it. Even with a time machine, he still can't predict his own future or change his own past.
  • Although Fridge Horror sets in when you realise that without the Uber-Morlock's influence, he states that the Morlocks would exhaust the food supply in a matter of months... which looks very much the Morlock-Future Alexander found himself in. And we know they have other colonies. invoked
    • But then he fixed it all with a big time explosion. Time explosions are special; they can destroy all Morlock colonies simultaneously without affecting the geology enough to dislodge the precious Eloi towns precariously stuck to the sides of precipices. Time explosions are funny that way.
    • He wiped out the Morlock colony that lost the Uber-Morlock that he killed. The others have their own Ubers, so they won't exhaust the food. Simple.
  • He couldn't save his girlfriend because then he would be creating a paradox, however he can influence the future because he's from the past and the time machine itself gives him greater insight on what will happen as well as how to stop and/or change it.
  • Technically, we don't know that he prevented the Skull-tunnels-everywhere future. Perhaps that will still happen due to some remnant Morlocks; however, that doesn't mean pure Downer Ending because he still managed to save the Eloi in that particular context. Plus, with that particular colony gone and the Eloi no longer being manipulated, there's a chance for them to setup their own defenses and fight off any incursions.
  • Also judging by how fast everything turned into basically Mordor during his fight with the Uber-Morlock,that Bad Future probably won't happen for thousands to millions of years, because the time machine was travelling through time fast enough to turn the UM to bones in the space of a few seconds which usually takes years.
  • The Bad Future we see is a snapshot of the year 635,427,810, which is a mind-bogglingly huge time skip, even from the year Alexander just left, 802,701. In the real world, 635 million years is about how long it took for protists to evolve into us. As bleak as that future looks, the Eloi and Morlocks are long gone at that point regardless.