Sun 30 Nov 2014
An SF/Fantasy Movie Review: THE TIME MACHINE (2002).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , SF & Fantasy films[7] Comments
THE TIME MACHINE. Dreamworks/Warner Brothers, 2002. Guy Pearce, Sienna Guillory, Samantha Mumba, Jeremy Irons, Orlando Jones, Mark Addy, Phyllida Law, Alan Young. Based on the novel by H. G. Wells and the 1960 screenplay by David Duncan. Director: Simon Wells.
There’s some resemblance between one of H. G. Wells’ most famous stories and this movie, but not a whole lot. I suspect it’s a lot closer to the 1960 film based on a screenplay by David Duncan, the one starring Rod Taylor and produced by George Pal, but it’s been so long that I watched that one that perhaps I should not even bring it up.
The first part of the movie, the part that takes place in Victorian England, is better by far than what follows, as Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) travels into the future to find out why he can’t change the past by means of a time machine he has built (a wonderful concoction of revolving rings, clockwork gears and sharply focused beams of light) — a past in which his fiancée dies, and keeps on dying every time to goes back in time to save her, only to fail.
In the far, far future mankind has evolved into two races: the Eloi, a peaceful lot who live above ground but who seem to have no purpose in their lives, and the Morlocks, a race of ravaging monsters who live below ground and prey on the Eloi at feeding time.
There are a lot of computer generated effects to make this future come to life. The past is easier to reproduce (ignoring the fact that Hartdegen’s betrothed (Sienna Guillory) uses present day makeup to enhance her already natural beauty). Much is made of Hartdegen’s inability to change the past, but the explanation, when it comes, is tossed off in a line that takes less than five seconds to say.
It is one of those temporal paradoxes like the one that says you can’t go back and kill your grandfather before you are born because then there would be no you to go back in time to kill your grandfather. But to put a proposition like this before an audience that might want to think about it while would take some effort, and Simon Wells (H. G. Wells great-grandson) takes the easier way out and concentrates on the monsters and the blow darts and the explosions instead, presumably thinking that’s enough to satisfy the reality based science fiction fans among us.
It isn’t. No more than to imagine that destroying the moon in its orbit in the 21st century would allow for any kind of life to exist on the Earth 800,000 years later, much less speak English.
December 1st, 2014 at 12:33 pm
I saw the first half of this a decade ago. Gave up in the middle: it was dreary, dull, and somehow depressing. The production values were lavish but lifeless.
IIRC, it bore little resemblance to the 1960 movie. Which is a fairly close adaptation of Wells’ novella, given the need to dramatize and Hollywoodize movie versions. This 1960 version has good visual design, too. I like it.
I cannot recall any temporal paradoxes in Well’s novella. Instead, Wells was interested in the FUTURE!
December 1st, 2014 at 12:38 pm
Favorite Time Travel Films:
Peabody’s Improbable History (1959-1963)
The Time Machine (George Pal, 1960)
Beyond the Time Barrier (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1960)
The Outer Limits: The Man Who Was Never Born (Leonard Horn, 1963)
Je t’aime, je t’aime (Alain Resnais, 1968)
Out of Time (Robert Butler, 1988)
Timecop (TV series, 1997)
Paycheck (John Woo, 2003)
Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004)
The Last Mimzy (Bob Shaye, 2007)
High-Brow Fantasy Films that use Time Travel:
Berkeley Square (Frank Lloyd, 1933)
Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992)
Sucre amer / Bitter Sugar (Christian Lara, 1997)
Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, 2002)
Brother to Brother (Rodney Evans, 2004)
December 1st, 2014 at 12:45 pm
Certainly agree with you about Berkeley Square. An attempt to remake it under the title I’ll Never Forget You was worthwhile but not a patch on the original.
December 1st, 2014 at 2:36 pm
Barry,
I agree on BERKLEY SQUARE though I like I’LL NEVER FORGET YOU a bit better than you.
Steve
Save that it is more upbeat than Wells novel Pal’s film is very close to about 90% of the novel. His main change is to give the Time Traveler a name (George, I suppose Herbert was too obvious).
This one — I didn’t even get to the half hour mark. Eventually I did see it and would just as soon I hadn’t. Even the special effects couldn’t save this mess.
Apparently talent skipped a couple of generations in Simon Wells case.
December 1st, 2014 at 3:38 pm
I do prefer the George Pal version over the newer one. The script does rather change the Wells story, with the original idea of the sybaritic upper classes becoming the food for the brutish but ingenious lower classes, with something about those who had fled to fall-out shelters during a nuclear war emerging to eat the surface dwelling survivors. It also removes the scenes where the traveller advances forward to see the end of the universe and realises that all human endeavour is ultimately pointless.
It’s a very, very likeable film, not least because it expresses Pal’s humane world view perfectly, leading up to an extremely poignant ending that left my childhood self with a lump in the throat. The new version is clever, but it isn’t really about anything. The original film might not have been pure Wells, but what was substituted was interesting in its own right. Simon Wells introduced some half-hearted time paradoxes that were not in the original, showing up that time-travel fiction has moved on since the original story was published. I much prefered Stephen Baxter’s sequel to the story, THE TIME SHIPS, which is bursting with ideas but manages to honour the original.
December 1st, 2014 at 5:44 pm
By the time this was made by Simon Wells the whole Time Paradox was on its way out as anything save a science fiction trope. The theory extant today is that if you travel to the past and change something all that happens is you create another timeline that would not effect the rest of us even though versions of us would exist in it save those effected by the actual paradox.
All the by your own bootstraps I’m my own grandpa Butterfly Effect nonsense is considered strictly the realm of fiction. The Universe it seems will not allow a paradox (don’t tell Chesterton). It just creates a variant timeline among the multiverse.
Of course now that String Theory is dying thanks to CERN’s particle accelerator we may be back down to only one Universe allowing paradox again. I think everyone is too busy backpedaling since finding the Higgs/Boson particle to bother with time travel as a concept.
It wasn’t until Frank Tippler that anyone even showed travel to the past was possible theoretically.
Simon Wells plot might have been cutting edge made ten years earlier but by 2002 serious scientists were no longer buying into the paradox theory. It’s actually considered somewhat quaint currently until the next theory comes along.
December 1st, 2014 at 8:50 pm
The 2002 movie drew more from the earlier George Pal production than it did from the novel. I’ve read that Gore Verbinski actually directed a good part of the film, even though Wells was credited. It isn’t a terrible movie, but giving the time traveler a cliched backstory didn’t help, and CGI has improved in the 12 years since.