THE TIME MACHINE (2002) Review

Why call it THE TIME MACHINE? Why hire a director that you can tout as being the direct descendent of the original author? Why send press copies of the original novel and the book on CD with Leonard Nimoy and John DeLancie reading it? Why do all this if you have no intention on making anything that even vaguely resembles H.G. Wells’ THE TIME MACHINE?

As the TIME MACHINE ended in the theater here in Austin last night, a group of film fans instantly assembled to tear the film to shreds… "If Jeremy Irons was a super psychic why didn’t he know what Guy Pearce was thinking about pulling?" "Why didn’t he just go back in time, get weapons and come forward to kick ass?" "If he can’t save her with the intention of living from that moment forward with his fiancée, why couldn’t he just go back in time, abduct her, move her into the future and begin their life in the future… leave a note for himself saying, ‘Alexander, this is yourself… you will never see your love again if you don’t build a time machine and meet her at this date and time and do the following. Btw, here are the plans to build the machine, hurry, the sooner you build it, the sooner you’ll be reunited with her. Otherwise, she’ll be dead for all time’?" "I can’t think of a single compelling reason to stay in the future with those idiots." "Ok, so he learns he can’t save his wife, but that he can change anything else, why not change the Moon blowing up?" "So if he has gained any knowledge about the future, he then becomes powerless to affect that future, doesn’t this mean he can’t do what he does at the end?" "Let me get this straight the Eloi can speak perfect English by staring at pieces of carved stone remainders of New York City Buildings? Where’s their pronunciation key?" "Why was that movie so damn boring?" "I hated the first half and kinda liked the second half" "I liked the first half and hated the last half" "What did that first woman see in Guy Pearce, he was a total spaz" "Samantha Mumba looked like a forceps squeezed fetus grown up" "So in the future people will live in lampshades?" "Why did THE TIME MACHINE have the score to THE LION KING?" "I thought Morlocks could only come out at night and were blinded by light?"

That’s just a sampling. It continued for an initial 30 minutes… then it was off for dinner, where the film continued to be torn asunder… By the time I got home I was enraged about the film. You see, here’s a film that has all the tools… all the talent… all the chances to have been something great. This was a favorite project of Spielberg’s… He retooled the script late in the process. The machine looks like an excellent toy, adequately conveying the sense that it is in fact a time machine. However, Stan Winston’s Morlocks are simply some of the worst conceived and designed and executed creatures in the history of film. Terrible. Real terrible. Jeremy Irons’ Uber-Morlock is great make-up, too bad that isn’t Winston, that was KNB. The Digital Domain time travel effects are wonderful, but it is too bad that they don’t affect Guy Pearce’s performance. Here is an inventor, moved into the future, planes, cars, televisions, yadda yadda yadda… And it just looks like he’s expected all of this and is not at all curious about it. By giving Pearce’s Alexander a singular purpose, you take away the spirit of adventure… That thing that H. G. Wells’ noted Time Traveler sought out… Like Sir Edmund Hillary, the time traveler in the novel sought to view that which no one had ever seen before. At the time of the great industrial revolution, when inventions that changed future history, he was going to see future history. All of that was gone.

Living in the shadow of George Pal’s original is not an easy thing, but there were things to build from in an accurate adaptation. One, the Eloi were not simply humans… They too had evolved. They were small slight human-like creatures around 4 foot in height. Their skin was like that of a Dresden doll, their eyes too large, their hair curly, their ears tiny, they spoke in soft cooing like tones. They were at once beautiful and with all the intellectual ability of a 5 year old child. They were… very much cattle. Gone is the ingenuity of the Time Traveler to learn their language. To discover the mystery of the new natural order of the world.

Gone is the mystery of to whence the Time Traveler went… Did he return to Weena? Did he go backwards in time? When in the heck did he go? There is a reason THE TIME MACHINE is a famous novel. Why it is a known book by nearly everyone… H.G. Wells wrote a doozy of a story, structured as a bit of a bar room tale to a gathering of friends that could not and would not believe. It is strange in a way… The movie FULL TIME KILLER is actually more true to the structure of THE TIME MACHINE as an adaptation and it has not an ounce of time travel in it.

Ok, so it isn’t an accurate adaptation. I knew that after I reviewed the script a year ago. Walking into the theater I knew that it would be a complete failure as an adaptation, so how is it as a movie? A movie with no source material. An independent work of its own.

I love the Time Travel genre. From George Pal’s TIME MACHINE to TIME AFTER TIME to SOMEWHERE IN TIME to TIME BANDITS to ROMAN SCANDALS to STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME to DONNIE DARKO to the BACK TO THE FUTURE Trilogy to THE TIME TRAVELERS to TWELVE MONKEYS to THE ADVENTURES OF BRISCO COUNTY JR to THE TIME TUNNEL to TIMECOP to DEMON WITH A GLASS HAND to TERMINATOR 1 & 2 to SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE to THE THREE STOOGES VS HERCULES to BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURES to DR WHO to LAND OF THE LOST to SAMURAI JACK to ARMY OF DARKNESS to AUSTIN POWERS to THE CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT to PLANET OF THE APES (original) to THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT to QUANTUM LEAP to THE WORLD WITHOUT END… these are all superior movies to the latest effort from DREAMWORKS. I recommend renting any of these instead.

Time Travel is one of the cornerstones of science fiction, one that has given us some of the best reads, films and ponderances as a thought. Dreamworks has created the most singularly dim time traveling genius ever. He has no concept of how to use time travel. He does nothing particularly remarkable other than write formulas on a series of chalkboards and casually mention he corresponds with an insane German patent clerk named Einstein. I don’t believe he was ever in love, I don’t believe he traveled through time… or at the least I would hope that whomever might create a time machine, may at least be in awe of the direction of time and the spectacles that one could behold.

H.G. Wells didn’t particularly have a theme he was trying to sell in THE TIME MACHINE, but George Pal did… In Pal’s version it was man’s self-destructive nature. This time, it seems that the message is that technology will be the doom of man… if we destroy our machines now, live in cliff-lamp-shades and abandon all sciences for communal storytime, that we will live happily ever after.

Ahem… coughbullshitcough…

There are moments of beauty, seconds of awe and over an hour of mediocrity and tripe. Had you a time machine, I recommend skipping the time it takes to see this movie.