FAQ

The group meets under the bleachers of the high school in Atlanta, GA. When they time-travel, they attend Lollapalooza in Chicago, IL. When they return from that trip, they are under the bleachers again, 41 seconds after they left. Every other trip in the movie did not seem to involve travel in space -- it seemed they always stayed in the same place, only traveling in time. And there was no space displacement mechanism ever explicitly discussed by the characters.

However, this is not a plot hole at all. There are several indications in the movie that the device does indeed allow for spatial displacement.

Firstly, every instantaneous time travel mechanism that keeps up with Earth's spin around its axis and with Earth's rotation around the Sun implicitly involves some spatial displacement mechanism. (If the mechanism were only temporal, then time-travelling to a moment that's 3 months in the past would have you end up somewhere in space rather than on Earth.)

Secondly, when the kids find the DARPA blueprints, Adam mentions that DARPA has tried experiments with *teleportation*, and he also reads the term "course deviation indicator" from the blueprints, which may very well be referring to a spatial displacement aspect of the time travel device.

Thirdly, when the kids hook up the device to a computer screen (using the graphics card from their gaming console), a graphical interface pops up that *explicitly* shows maps with a departure position (marked in green) and an arrival position (marked in red), which means that there *is* a spatial displacement mechanism.

Fourthly, during their first tests, the toy car that they send into the past is also spatially relocated by the time travel process: it starts on the floor and ends up partly "fused" into the wall.

So the fact that the device can also relocate them from Atlanta, GA, to Chicago, IL, isn't weird, illogical or unaddressed at all. It just wasn't explicitly spoon-fed to the audience.