A Movie Ponderable

I’m watching The Time Machine on DVD at the moment, the 1960 version. I’m enjoying it so far, but it’s still early. The beginning of the movie opens with four gentlemen invited to dinner at the home of a mutual friend. The friend arrives late, dirty and disheveled, after returning from the distant future.

I’ll say that again: the man arrives late, just as the others are sitting down to dinner. Certainly, any man with a time machine has no excuse for arriving late for anything? If he returned promptly at 8:00 for dinner, couldn’t he have made it five minutes earlier? Or a whole hour, and give himself time to get cleaned up before his friends arrived?

Marty McFly made the same realization in Back to the Future; just made me wonder.