Movie Review: The Time Machine (2002)

by Idris Hsi - Mar 11, 2002

The Time Machine was originally a visionary book by H.G. Wells describing a Victorian scientist who travels to the sitant future and sees that the human race has split into two species, Eloi and Morlocks and that the Morlocks have turned the Eloi into a food source by keeping them ignorant and docile. Wells gives us a visionary tale of time travel and a cautionary one about the misuse of technology. The book was made into a movie in 1960 directed by George Pal. The 1960 version stuck mostly to the plot and social commentary of the original, with a little added anti-nuclear war message, and was reasonably good as a result. A lot can change in 40 years including an industry's desire to produce serious and thoughtful fiction. Now in 2002, we now have this shallow, empty-headed, and flashy descendent of a venerable story with great special effects but not much else.

At the beginning of the 20th century in New York, we find a Victorian professor by the name of Alexander Hartdegan (Guy Pierce) who has an obsession with technology and with time. For our modern and cynical sensibilities, it's no longer enough to want to travel forward in time in the pursuit of knowledge so Hartdegan's provided with a new motivation.  A series of stupidities causes his fiancée (Siena Guillory) Emma to die at the hands of a mugger and sets him on a quest to travel back in time to save her. He succeeds in building a time machine but after many journeys back in time he discovers that he can't keep his fiancée from dying. Figuring that he made an error in his temporal calculations and that someone might have solved this in the distant future he travels to the year 2032 for the answer. Failing to find the answer at the New York City Library, now equipped with the ultimate search engine, a holograph named Vox (Orlando Jones) (really the only interesting character in the movie), he moves forward in time again only to find that just 3 years later, humanity has caused a disaster that is threatening civilization (the moon blows up - it's in the trailers). An accident happens during Hartdegan's escape and he is knocked unconscious while his machine hurtles into the distant future. 8000700 years later. Finally, (coincidentally on the same day as my birthday) the time machine stops and he regains consciousness amongst the Eloi who have this little problem....

After that, the movie starts to really fall apart. There is a brief moment of lucid clarity and depth that lasts all of 20 minutes but it's balanced out by the silly and ridiculous ending that had all of us laughing in the aisles. The problems with the movie didn't have anything to do with its technical implementations. The acting was solid. There were some fantastic visuals of the Eloi city, the Morlock lair, and the New York of the not-too distant future. Even the soundtrack was pretty good. The main killers of this movie was the badly written story and the style-over-substance approach taken by the director, Simon Wells - a descendent of H.G. Wells (it was suggested on IMDb that if Simon had been a descendent of Orson Welles that the movie might have been better).

The Time Machine eats up the Rule of One (the one 'we'll buy that for now' we give to all movies) very quickly because of the basic premise underlying the story. We're willing to grant, for the sake of the movie that you can travel back in time as was H.G. Wells. But Wells' purpose in writing The Time Machine was not to explain the inner workings of temporal mechanics but to explore some social issues in the context of science fiction. For whatever reason, the writers feel that they have to explain everything and this is where they get into trouble, violating the Rule of One almost every 10 minutes or so. The Eloi speak English that they learn from the stone tablets from former storefronts and markers of Really Old New York. How the Eloi translator gets "you should travel back to your own time" from "Tiffany and Co." and "Broadway" is a mystery. The Eloi can build fantastically complicated and beautiful windmills and cliff cities but haven't worked out how not to be sheep or how to build weapons. We're shown Morlocks with sophisticated technology and the knowledge of how to build great HVAC but they haven't worked out how to subsist beyond basic cannibalism. Then there are some odd and silly uses of the Time Machine, lots of unnecessary fu, and at least one unexplained change of clothing. There are enough plot holes for this movie to be declared a form of cheese. Just to add insult to injury, the various social warnings of the book have been glossed over. Instead, the take-home moral that we left the theater with was "Don't blow up the moon." - good advice for anyone but not terribly deep or useful.

We recommend that you skip The Time Machine and wait for it to come out on video giving it a 5 on the Good Movie Scale and a 6 on the Bad Movie Scale. It's very mediocre and the really spiffy visuals probably rate no better than a twilight showing price if you feel compelled to go. We do recommend that you read the original story which is one of the venerable and revered ancestors of modern science fiction. Doing so may help to soothe the now-troubled spirit of Wells. You can find it here:

http://www.bartleby.com/1000/1.html

Our Drive-In Totals:

0 Breasts
1 Dead body x 2
21.8 Disintegrating Bodies
~372 'Walker County' style Bodies
42 Timepieces
A Hell of a Town
1 Unfortunate Acknowledgement of H.G. Wells
Faster than a Speeding Explosion, Stronger than a Gargantuan Plot Hole, Able to Climb Steep Walls In a Single Bound...
Moon over Miami, London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, Canada...
Hooked on Photonics
Time Bomb
"Baaaaaa!"
Head in the Sand
The Time Machine on Broadway
The Time Machine on Old Broadway
The Majesty and Permanence of the English Language
Windmill Memorials
Learning Sign Language
Anatomically Distributed Cannibals
Magically Spontaneously-Appearing Clothing
Ye Olde Super Bad Guy
Glow In The Dark Fishies
Roach Free Future

Kung Fu
Gun Fu
Seismic Fu
Horse and Cart Fu
Knife Fu

Blowgun Dart Fu
Pocket Watch Fu
Time Fu

Good Movie Scale: 5
Bad Movie Scale: 6