The Time Machine (Long)

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The Time Machine

From Intriguing to Hokey in about Forty Minutes…

Simon Wells’ remake of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine was something I eagerly anticipated for the past year and a half. George Pal, in his 1960 version, gave us a glimpse 800,000 years into the future, a glimpse which contained nuclear war and utter monstrosities. It was somewhat pulpy, but more terrifying than anything else. If that was 42 years ago, my thinking went, just try to imagine what today’s CGI effects could do with concepts like the Morlocks, or an aged planet.

Wells tried (coincidentally, he’s H.G. Wells’ grandson), and his depiction is worth watching for perhaps the first half of the movie as he explores the traditional haunting questions addressed by the original The Time Machine (can we change the future, what’s the future of humanity, blah blah blah...okay, let's get to the monsters and nuclear destruction already!). After that, though, Wells’ attempts at blending fantasy and adventure into the web of intrigue he’s created with his treatment of time travel gets hopelessly muddled, resulting in a confusing mishmash of appeals and a disappointingly vapid climax.

Guy Pearce is cast as the Traveler (Prof. Alexander Hartdegen), mourning the loss of his fiancé after a failed attempt at thwarting a mugging and searching ceaselessly for four years for a way to change what happened. He builds the Time Machine (which looks strikingly like the original Machine in the 1960 classic), tries to change history but cannot, and begins his search for answers by traveling to the future.

Wells knows how to manipulate special effects to dramatic closure, I will say that. Hartdegen’s visit to futuristic New York is entertaining in a campy sort of way; we see new wave hairdos, building-side televisions and even a friendly AI librarian (Orlando Jones). All of this puts us in the same adventurous mode that Zemeickis strove for in Back to the Future II: we keep asking ourselves “Hey, couldn’t it really be like that someday?” and we play along. Our witness of the destruction of the moon and the subsequent chaos on Earth, however, is framed within a small field of vision, which reminds us that we’re looking at a set. Then, after a bump on the head, Hartdegen wakes up 800,000 years in the future after another ice age and the reemergence of humans on the planet…and here, things get a bit difficult for me to swallow.

The Eloi, surface-dwelling humans of this “brave new world,” could best be described as exotics (at least we didn't have an "Altaira" from Forbidden Planet asking for sex lessons). All the women are voluptuous and gentle; all the men are athletic and cautious; nobody knows anything about fighting or aggressiveness. Ridiculously enough, thought the moon is now in pieces (presumably having made a ring of our own, just like Saturn), the English language has survived as a “tradition,” and segments of sidewalks and signs from New York are also on display. Samantha Mumba (Mana) becomes Hartdegen’s love interest (in the original novel, the Eloi weren’t even human, so this whole romance angle smacks of drivel to me), urging Hartdegen to leave with her sister Kalen (Omera Mumba).

When the Morlocks finally do appear, they look more like characters from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop than the horrific underground monsters they were supposed to be. They hunt down several of the Eloi much in the manner of Planet of the Apes, squirrel them away, and when nobody is able to do anything, Hartdegen explores their subterranean lairs and learns the horrific truth about both them and his own destiny as a time traveler. The film’s climax and conclusion are rather confusing to follow—Hartdegen somehow rigs his time machine to emit a time-blast that erases the existence of everything around it—and the conclusion is nothing more than a sentimental, contrived piece of fluff trying to echo the sentiment that “the best things in life are where we least expect them.”

There was a lot of potential with this movie that got completely shot when, for the sake of revisionism, too many goofy angles were included in order to speed the film along. It would be potentially misleading to label this as a "science fiction" movie since, although I can accept the potential reality of time travel, I can't accept the possibility that Standard American English could survive an ice age and transformation of the human race when it couldn't even keep the word "prithee" in the vernacular for more than three or four hundred years...or the idea that a computer, no matter how advanced, can avoid destruction, or even immersion in a flow of molten lava or something. This would make a great rental, but it puts a hell of a lot of "fiction" in the "science fiction."

-Long