User Reviews

THE TIME MACHINE which I first saw at its London premiere in 1960 has long remained a personal favorite of mine. I bought the film 17 years ago and my own children grew up with it during the many times we have watched it since. It had a distinct charm and news of its impending remake was of no interest to me...another un-reworkable film if ever there was going to be one! I had no interest in its existence and even less inclination to see it. Dragged, protesting to the theater recently by my daughter who had already seen it and who, under the insane belief that I would enjoy it, strapped me into the seat! Raving incoherently and fully intending to dislike each and every frame, I watched what I expected to be my greatest nightmare since SPEED 2.

Well girls and guys...I was so wrong! The remake not only captures and enhances the memory and feel of the original in many ways, it is vastly better! Pearce, who improves mightily as the film progresses (his early wimpy appearance telegraphed danger as far as I was concerned!) is just plain excellent as the slightly unhinged designer. The time machine itself (understandably, with today's fx potential) creams Rod Taylor's 1960 mini-umbrella! Mark Addy makes a great "Philby" very much in the style of Alan Young's original characterisation. Nice touch too, having him cameo here as the florist! For him of course, he has experienced his own "time machine" in the 42 intervening years!

"One hit wonder" Samantha Mumba is an acting natural and as the Eloi girl, hits exactly the right note called for in the role. Both she and her younger brother Omero contribute greatly to the film's success. Everything about this film is visually impressive. Wonderfully imaginative sets and masterful cinematography. Jeremy Irons' small but significant role comes off well too!

I read complaints about the Morlock make-up? Hello? Any of you ever SEEN a Morlock? No??? Well then, kindly refrain from negative comment. These guys looked and moved way better than the little furry 1960 creations! I liked also the intent NOT to have Pearce able to reverse the death of his fiancee - that was heightened awareness on someone's part!

Add to the above a superb musical score and if this doesn't all make for an entertaining and thought provoking film, hey guys, you're hard to please. Certainly this was never intended for THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS set! It is inarguably the best remake I have ever seen and one of only a few have that ever managed to improve on the original!

By the third millennium, special-effects became sufficiently sophisticated to finally bring Wells' tremendous novel(s) to the screen with their full visual, visceral and narrative impact. Yet here again; just like Speiberg and his 'War Of The World' a director thought he knew better than the original and decided to 'screw around'.

I'll begin with some praise. The time machine as a vehicle was wonderfully realised. Instead of an 'armchair with a spinning parasol' from the 1950's movie, we had something that was both mechanical in a 19th century fashion, but with an 'optical-visual' update that made it seem wonderfully contrived. The effect was dramatic - a great amalgam of science and fantasy that did HG Wells proud. I particularly liked the telescopic mounting-steps.

But then there was the story. The soppy, predictable romances both in present and future might have been concocted by Disney. We had the idealised Eloi community - and far more human-looking than Wells imagined - with a politically-corrected mixed-race heroine yummy-mummy who might have been born next door. That is; if you lived in the 20th/21st centuries. Their idealised circumstances were given emphasis by rather stylistic Polynesian tribal music scores. Everything is apparently sweetness and light - or is it? And, of course, they've had the good sense to carry on speaking English with American accents. As you would after 800,000-odd years. Hmmm.

The Eloi are just so nice, it makes their contrast with the Morlocks that much more civilised when the latter finally appear. Moral issues are simplified for the crass modern viewer. Here the Eloi are a sensible, practical self-sufficient people in their own right. And, of course, they're human. Morlocks, by contrast, are hideous, strong, violent carnivorous hunters. Unlike those envisaged by Wells; these Morlocks can come out in daytime, and they possess superhuman strength and agility. There's no ethical dilemma here.

Or is there? later we discover that the Morlocks themselves employ a caste system like that of termites. And our time-traveller finds himself introduced to the grand-wizard-Morlock-bloke-thing who is seriously brainy. He can even read minds. Why, it's Jeremy Irons reprising his intellectual bad guy role in such a beautifully-coiffured blonde wig that whatever the Morlocks may lack in table-manners they evidently make up for in hairdressing skills. He has rather disagreeable plans for the yummy-mummy whom he also holds captive. To his credit; he offers to let the time-traveller go - with no strings. But that would mean abandoning the yummy-mummy to a fate worse than death or something, and in true comic-book fashion a hero can never do that.

Instead, he sabotages his time-machine, destroying the Morlock enclave, and presumably gets to screw his yummy-mummy into an indefinite Morlock-free future. Though whether he will sire any offspring is a moot biological point; 800,000 years is a long period of gene isolation.

Four of my stars go to the machine. The other two are for sundry effects and sets. But the rest? Well; script and plot were complete junk. Acting was 2nd rate. As to Wells' classic novel and idea? All of his imaginative and thought-provoking concepts were jettisoned in the name of a bog-standard hero-saves-hapless-'maiden', romance-against-adversity tale as crass as 'Pearl Harbour' and as predictable as 'Titanic'. Mediocre; worth a single watch, but no substitute for the book.

What the hell's wrong with directors these days? With a little more thought, this could have been great.

The 2002 version of "The Time Machine" is just the latest in a string of terribly disappointing Hollywood remakes that fall flat on their face despite extravagant special effects.

What a lousy, uninspired bland story, with no imagination. Why so totally rewrite such a wonderful sci-fi classic? Are today's movie audiences too hip for the H.G. Wells writing largely as is? The 1960 George Pal version told a much more endearing story, even with clunky low-budget effects, beach-party looking Eloi, and Morlocks that looked like Smurfs on steroids.

The 2002 version must have H.G Wells turning in his grave:

1. The idea that the time traveler is motivated by the desire to change the past and trapped in a time paradox is an old sci-fi cliché. This totally distracts from the love affair with Mara (what happened to Weena?!) that made the 1960 version so endearing. This sets an unfortunate and distractive tone early on that makes the whole movie dour. If Guy Pearce's character was so brilliant either he or his buddy Einstein would have realized the time paradox dilemma – not have it dawn on him 800,000 yrs in the future – from a Morlock no less, Doh!! What's wrong with time-traveling just for fun & adventure & curiosity -- as embodied in the 1960 version?

2. Only if you saw the first movie would you realize at all what Pearce was doing with the time machine when you first see it. The George Pal film carefully explains the whole weird idea of 'travel' though a 4th dimension.

3. The director goes out of his way to make Pearce's character look geeky, a worn out old stereotype of scientists. In the 1960 version Rod Taylor was a little nerdy too (at least around Weena) but managed to be swashbuckling, playful and charming.

4. Among the key themes of the 60's version -- abandoned in the remake -- is the idea that endless war leads to the bifurcation of humanity. Blowing up the Moon to destroy humanity is pointless -- and doesn't do much for science literacy. For over 4 billion years the Moon has suffered vastly more powerful asteroid impacts, which would make any nuclear device look like a firecracker. Yes, science fiction needs artistic license, but this is just plain dumb and meaningless.

5. Destroying the time machine is stupid too. Apparently our time traveler invented the neutron bomb to power this thing. Blowing up the machine to kill Morlocks is sort of a cop-out 'machina ex machina' Disappointingly, Pearce never comes back to the 1800s to tell his tale to his incredulous friends, a key part of the Wells story with the irony that in a week the time travels goes into the far future and back.

6. Having Morlocks running around in the daytime totally ruins H.G. Wells' wonderfully spooky, ghoulish portrayal of them as shadowy creatures of the night. A true cinematic opportunity lost. Also, Wells depicted the Eloi as frail and childlike. These guys in the movie looked like they could take on Morlocks, if they weren't such big baby wusses.

7. The one smart Morlock – kind of a bleached-out Star Wars Evil Emperor -- had potential, but is so lame and aloof he tells Pearce to take his machine and go home ?! Boy, what a dramatic high point! In the book the Morlocks steal the machine because they are so fascinated by it, and fight to keep it.

8. The goof ball hologram at the N.Y. Public Library is too much. It makes light of the idea of human cannibalism. the 1960 version simply had the "talking rings" that delivered a chillingly somber eulogy for humankind. Derailed evolution is serious stuff.

Its sad the wonderful effects in this movie can never make up for a weary contrived clunker of a script. Save the cost of a ticket & popcorn and go rent the DVD when it comes out (soon no doubt), at least you can fast-forward thought the dull parts, just like our time traveler.

... because director Simon Wells didn't have to travel back in time to ruin his great-grandfather's story: he just had to make this movie!

(badum tss)

More seriously, The Time Machine can be judged on two levels.

As science-fiction adventure it's passable, if conventional. Professor Alexander (Guy Pearce) builds a time machine and ends up in a remote future where two races inhabit Earth, the friendly Eloi and the monstrous Morlocks.

As an adaptation, it's disastrous: all social subtext has been completely erased. The Eloi are kind, helpful, loyal, environmental-friendly and graceful, while the Morlocks are a bunch of beastly subterranean cannibals. This robs the movie of any deeper meaning than a typical good versus evil struggle.

Performances are acceptable, but characters are so flat they fail to register. Pearce's Alexander is too anodyne to be interesting; Irons' Morlock leader appears too late to be relevant.

Soundtrack and visual effects are remarkable - too bad they are wasted in service of a banal script.

5,5/10

In 1960, I sat in a theater at the age of 12 and was totally dazzled by the original Time Machine, going so far as to run home and recreate a model of the miniature.

In the 2002 remake, the time machine itself is a gorgeous contraption of brass, spinning disks and other parts, light beams, and a force field ball that envelops the machine as it travels through time. In operation, it's a visual treat. That's about it for superlatives.

As I began watching the remake, I briefly considered how much the art and technology of movie making has advanced and wondered how the remake would benefit. Unfortunately, not so much -- there was little in the way of refreshing of visuals in the movie. In fact, Alexander's travel to the future duplicates the scene of hemlines rising and falling in the shop across the way to the degree I thought they borrowed footage from the original movie. The fact that Mara and Kalen not only understand English, but speak it as if they grew up in the present day US, is a real stretch. Alexander reaches that conclusion that you cannot alter the past. However, he did precisely that when he went back and changed how Emma dies. 800,000 years into the future, pieces of the shattered moon seem to be in the same positions they were in shortly after its destruction. They should have moved, possibly back toward the moon, or to become rings around the earth. The Uber Morlock just seemed to introduce unneeded confusion and another opportunity for a knock-down fight.

To sum up, Time Machine of 2002 is enjoyable for the most part, and deserves the "6" rating it received, but is clearly not the equal of the 1960 version that garnered a 7.6.

Yet with time travel comes the inescapable un-definition of reality: the paradox. Which is seen in The Time Machine, and is one of only two downfalls the movie has.

Spoilers.

First of all, the graphics are great. I love it while Alexander is traveling through time, seeing progress as it could never have been seen before. I was impressed with how real it all looks, even though it is going so fast. The clarity of everything in those spans of time makes the movie much more understandable and beautiful.

I really love the plot. Alexander Hartdegen loses a loved on and goes back in time to save her. Yet he finds he cannot save her, so he goes into the future to find an answer. His travels take him to VOX, a computer version of Orlando Jones who is extremely intelligent and has a snappy attitude, and the crash landing of the moon. That moon looks really cool, even in a scene later in the movie in which fragments are still floating in orbit around Earth. Alexander eventually finds himself in the year 800,000, where mankind has split into two groups.

However, this conflict between the Morlocks and the Eloi (much like the Moiety in Riven) is way too short. Thus being the second downfall of the movie. The time traveling aspect of it is extremely interesting, not just to think about, but to watch. Yet that is not enough to keep me fully satisfied. The conflict is great, but too short.

I really like the music (in fact, the day I wrote this is the day I bought the soundtrack). Klaus Badelt is paving a road that is extraordinary. He gives some excellent melodic themes for Alexander as well as a theme for time travel itself. The Morlocks' drum-beats are reminiscent of John Williams' The Lost World score, which I really love.

The Morlocks could be better, too. They are mostly puppets, which is kind of a disappointment since it is so easily recognizable. But they are freaky enemies, good enough for the show.

Guy Pearce is one great actor. I really like his performance in this movie, as the intelligent scholar, ambitious yet nervous, who is in love with a beautiful woman who gets caught up in unexplainable events. He really portrays Alexander well. The other actors do good, too, but not as great as Pearce.

Combining drastically beautiful scenery, great graphics, an excellent score and a great set of actors, The Time Machine is a really good movie. I recommend it to anyone who likes the sci-fi genre.

When DreamWorks Pictures and Warner Brothers teamed up to film H.G. Wells' pioneer pulp science fiction yarn "The Time Machine," they made it a family affair and hired the author's great-grandson Simon Wells to helm their $70-million plus movie. Previously, Wells directed two animated features: "Balto" (1995) and "The Prince of Egypt" (1998), so "The Time Machine" challenged him as his first attempt at a live-action outing. Not surprisingly, Simon says in his introduction to Ace Paperbacks' new edition of his great-grandfather's venerable novel, "The film we set out to make is not a verbatim recapitulation of the book. We did not intend it to be. I do not feel it is the duty of filmmakers to simply put books on film. That would seem to undermine both media." Apparently, something undermined Wells because 18 days before shooting wrapped, he succumbed to extreme exhaustion, and Gore Verbinski of "The Mexican" replaced him. Yes, "The Time Machine" surpasses the dreadful "Mexican." In fact, the new "Time Machine" depicts its subject matter with far greater verisimilitude than its Oscar winning forerunner. The lengthy, snail-like end credits reveal that scenarist John ("Gladiator," "Any Given Sunday," and "Bats") Logan drew on David Duncan's script from the original 1960 M-G-M epic, directed by George Pal, starring Rod Taylor, Yvette Mimieux, Alan Young, and Sebastian Cole. Indeed, Pal's version rather than the Victorian 1895 novel (serialized in 1894) inspired Wells and Logan.

Nevertheless, Wells & Logan wrought several changes that not only differentiate their mediocre remake from Wells' original text, but also from its juvenile cinematic predecessor. Indeed, the slickly done remake sets its sights much higher than the original movie but ascends to pretentious pinnacles without achieving a cathartic effect. Sadly, the 2002 version of "The Time Machine" qualifies as strictly second-hand hokum. Loyal Wells' readers may bristle at the liberties that the filmmakers have taken with the source material. First, they shift the story setting from London to New York City. I suspect they did so because an episode similar to the shoot-out in Central Park would never have occurred in England. Second, they give the protagonist of the novel a rather geeky name: Alexander Hartdegen. In the original, the hero was Herbert Wells. Third, they saddle him with a fiancée. In the novel, the hero lived as a bachelor with little interest in the opposite sex. After all, he pays matronly Mrs. Watchett to clean and cook for his intellectual pals and himself. Neither its opulently hallucinogenic computer-generated special effects nor its realistic looking 19th century production values can redeem this murky, moribund melodrama about the moral consequences of time travel. According to "The Time Machine," you cannot alter antiquity.

In 1899, an eccentric Columbia University Professor, Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pierce of "Memento"), plans to wed his sweetheart Emma (Jessica Lange lookalike Sienna Guillory of "Love Actually"). After Alex gives Emma a ring, an armed assailant robs them. Alex tangles with him. During the fracas, the thief wounds Emma accidentally, and she dies in Alex's arms. Four years elapse as Alex toils in his laboratory to create a time machine so he can go back and save poor Emma. Although he prevents Emma's tragic murder, Alex fails to save her when a runaway carriage collides with her and kills her. Tastefully handled as this sequence and the previous one were, the effect borders on hilarity. Grief-stricken, Alex wants to learn if mankind can reverse the past. He hurtles his time machine and himself into the distant future. Civilization has atrophied into two primitive societies: the peaceful, cliff-dwelling Eloi that appear straight out of director Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" remake. When a beautiful, deeply-tanned Eloi dame Mara (Samantha Mumba of "Johnny Was") saves Alex, he falls for her and helps her people oppose the aggressive Morlocks.

Altogether, "The Time Machine" sticks to the basics of producer George Pal's opus, but Wells and Logan have dispensed with H.G. Wells' socialist commentary. The worst thing that Alex complains about here is bowing to the fashion dictates of the day and wearing a bowler hat. Meanwhile, "The Time Machine" departs even farther, including a disaster involving the Moon instead of a meteor and an explosive "Stargate" ending that obliterates the depraved Uber-Morlock adversary (a long-haired Jeremy Irons of "Dungeons & Dragons"). Irons relies on his scary white make-up and black lip-liner to churn up chills, but he doesn't appear long enough on screen to make much of an impact. The phony Morlocks make a mild impression as the dastards of this film. Stan Winston, who designed these evil creatures, blew it on these thugs. They have faces like wooden Hawaii masks. Indeed, they look cool when they kidnap their victims and descend like the Martians from "Invaders from Mars" (1953) into the earth. Not only have Wells and Logan turned the classic Wells' tale into a turgid tearjerker, but they also have concocted a laughable, anti-technology manifesto, too!

The 1960 version by George Pal has stop-motion effects that seem dated now, especially compared to the dazzling images we see on the screen here, and yet I kind of prefer the earlier version. It was dated, pedantic, and simple -- or simple minded, if you like. But that very simplicity made it easier to follow the plot and to understand the points that Wells was eager to make. This version is longer, better acted, but is filled with action, some of it gory, that Pal's version wasn't very concerned with.

Neither version, I gather, was that close to Wells' original. Pal's was closer in depicting the Eloi as an air-headed white-bread society with pink skins. This one is more realistic. The Eloi seem to be a mixed race. They look vaguely Polynesian -- what with body tattoos, pareus, and cowrie shells. In fact their culture looks like that of the Samoans and so do many of the Eloi themselves. If you took a sample of genes from all three major racial stocks, put them in a blender, and dumped them out on a table, they'd look like Samoans, which is not the worst fate in the world. Mara (whatever happened to Weena?) doesn't look quite as corruptly innocent as Yvette Mimieux but we can live with that.

Guy Pearce is pretty good. He has a commanding face, prognathous and full of masculine bone structure, and his performance is quite different from that in "L.A. Confidential," the only other work of his that I've seen. Jeremy Irons has a bit part as the Uber-Morlock, the brains of the hypogeal gang, so to speak. He's given what I guess are philosophical points to make in his brief appearance but I must be slow because I didn't get them.

The problem with these films is that they both throw away Well's reasons for why things turned out the way they did. Capitalism has led to a two-tier society (the eaten and the eaters), and evolution (still a controversial idea) had its way for reasons that Wells spelled out. All of that is missing. We don't get any reasons for the lack of sexual bifurcation in the Eloi, nor any reason for their empty-headedness. Instead, we are given the Eloi as is -- "Here they are, folks!" No hint whatever that they are the descendants of the worn-out wealthy class of earlier days.

I don't mean that this film should have been a series of lectures on the future physical and cultural evolution of our society. Just that certain questions and answers could easily have been built into the story itself, particularly if some of the violent scenes, unnecessarily long, had been elided. And what the hell is the black, stinky, gooey stuff on those blowgun darts anyway? It can knock down a full-grown man but it only frightens a little girl.

Overall impression: Not bad, not insulting, but it looks as if it were the consequence of a meeting of a board of MBAs who began by asking, "What NEW story is there that we can juice up with modern computer-generated images? The Time Machine? Great! Cannibalism and a destroyed earth -- a bonanza of fireworks!"

I tried to watch this film with an open mind. After all, it's not an easy task to turn a short novella into a full feature length film. And, given that this and all of H.G. Wells' stories are told by first-person narration, it would take some careful adaptation to preserve the tone of the book, much of which takes place in the narrator's own head as he attempts to rationalise the world he has been thrust into, as any pragmatic man of science would. If that sounds dull to you, worry not, because this is not a careful adaptation, it's Hollywood. To their credit, they didn't cast Brendan Fraser as the time traveller, but when you see the way they hacked up the script, they might as well have.

Spoiler time, so only read on if you've seen it - or don't plan to, which is a fine idea, since this film is now 12 years old and the intervening years have spawned a number of other bombs on which you could waste an hour and a half of your life.

I'll begin at the beginning, which is the first thing they ruined. The beginning of H.G. Wells' novel is full of charm and mystery that sets the scene. Time's been kind to this story, unlike some of Wells' work, and there was an opportunity to tell a really good tale here whilst still being trendy and engaging...perhaps even a little steam-punk. The dinner party, the educated sceptics, the presentation of the machine - have been omitted entirely. Replacing it is a done-to-death tale of lost love, which is presented as the reason for the time traveller's invention, because apparently science needs a feminine muse and invention for invention's sake is not enough.

Speaking of love, if you were hoping to see how the nuanced, innocent, paternalistic and vaguely uncomfortable relationship between the time traveller and Weena was handled, this simply isn't there either. The Eloi aren't as you might remember them, and the female lead is far from naive and child-like - she's a teacher. You don't need to be a linguist to want to start pounding your head against the screen when she begins speaking perfect English after a mere 800,000 years.

It doesn't get any better after that. Cue heavy use of CGI and scary creatures that might as well be LOTR orcs (yawn), another bad dude and a big and poorly explained explosion. Big dumb happy ending, none of the reflective scenes from the end of the book. The addition of the holographic librarian is welcome and adds a sense of continuity and comic relief that this film so desperately needs.

If you're not a reader, you may get something out of this film. There are worse in its genre. To understand why I'm SO disappointed, you really have to be familiar with Wells' work. He was a thinker, a visionary, a man of big ideas. His work is philosophical, but Wells takes the role of the observer as he postulates his ideas - he doesn't pause to moralise. This film does the opposite - no room for free thought is left with the viewer; the protagonist rushes in in shining armour so that you may go home comfortable.

I had high hopes for this film, given that the great grandson of the book's author was involved in directing it. I'm left wondering if he's even read the original text. Oh, Simon, in a few short generations you have become an entirely different creature from your grandfather. How positively ELOI of you! You could say Wells foresaw this, in his lesser known work "A Story of the Days to Come".