The Time Machine ***
Directed by: Gore Verbinski and Simon Wells
Written by: H. G. Wells (novel), David Duncan (earlier screenplay) and John Logan (screenplay)
Starring: Guy Pearce, Samantha Mumba, Orlando Jones, Omero Mumba and Jeremy Irons
Rated PG-13 (Violence, I guess. It wasn’t language or nudity or sexual content, so it must be violence.)
Later on in this review, I’m going to put WAY too much thought into what happened in the movie. I’ll warn you when we get to that part.
I’ll start off by saying that I liked this movie. I didn’t LIKE it like it, but I liked it. I don’t want to marry the movie, but it’s decent.
If you don’t know the story, well, you’re probably new to Western Culture. Welcome. For those of you who sort-of know what The Time Machine is about (like me), this synopsis should be accurate. For those of you who know the book by heart, as well as every other thing that H. G. Wells has written, you probably should skip ahead.
Alexander Hartdegen (Pearce) is an associate physics professor in New York during the last years of the 19th Century, presumably 1899. He’s going to ask his comely girlfriend Emma (Sienna Guillroy) to marry him. It’s all very sweet, but then, just after he slips the ring on her finger, they’re mugged and she winds up dead. Alexander doesn’t like this turn of events at all, and builds a (get ready for this) time machine so that he can go back in time to change history so Emma doesn’t die. Turns out that he can’t change history, so he goes into the future, where he meets Vox (Jones), a computer at the library. Later on, he ventures farther into the future, and sees the moon falling apart (due to human development of sublunar colonies). Even farther into the future goes our protagonist, 800,000 years all told. He meets Mara (S. Mumba) and her brother Kalen (O. Mumba), who are humans who call themselves Eloi. There’s another race on the planet, too. The Morloks. They’re bad.
While I’ve not read the book (I just can’t get through 19th Century Literature), I know that the Eloi, the Morloks and a time machine are involved. As far as everything else in the movie, I’m not so sure.
Of course, given that one of the directors is the great-grandson of H. G., I’ll allow liberties to be taken at will.
The movie looks very good. There was one part where one of the compositors (the people who bring together the real actors and anything else that isn’t really there) was apparently asleep at the switch that looked really bad, but everything else looked really slick. The machine itself is quite obviously patterned after the 1960 George Pal machine, but with more glass and brass. The makeup and cgi elements for the Morloks are very good. That’s what happens when Stan Winston (possibly the best ‘monster maker’ around), Industrial Light and Magic (If you’ve ever seen a movie by Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, you’ve seen their work) and Digital Domain (James Cameron’s company. Did Titanic.) work together.
Guy Pearce is a fine actor. He held his own against James Cromwell, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito and Russell Crowe in L.A. Confidential. He’s able to chew scenery like a veteran in this flick. Orlando Jones is entertaining. You’ve seen him before. He was the old “7-Up Guy”. While he doesn’t use his comedy skills in this picture, it’s a step in the right direction for him career-wise. Jeremy Irons is in it, he’s good, but his part is really, really small. However, he makes up for it with one of the neatest gross-out costumes I’ve seen in a while.
OK – here’s where I’m gonna start thinking too much. I’ll let you know when I’m done.
The book was written before Einstein came out with his theories of relativity, and LONG before we even had an inkling of quantum mechanics, or multiverse theories, all that stuff. So, from a science standpoint, the story just doesn’t work. Which is fine. With sci-fi, there are just some things that you need to accept. As long as the universe that the story creates is constant, it works. Except when it doesn’t.
For example: while travelling in time, the machine stays in one place, while the world around it changes. When it stops ‘travelling’, it comes back into a reality that we can perceive. During the climax, however, the machine is visible as it ‘travels’. At another point, it is indicated that while time does not pass while within the machine, if something falls out of the field that the machine emits, it is affected by the environment. The machine, in effect, creates its own isolated pocket universe. However, during an ice age, Alexander is shown with frost on his face – one universe affecting another. If this can happen, then the whole premise is shot. And, I just don’t buy the Morloks.
I never have. I know what they are, but I just don’t buy it. Yes, 800,000 years is a long, long time. Heck, it’s only been 12,000 years since the last ice age. I just never bought them. Even if we did lose all of our technology, we wouldn’t lose everything. We would still have oral traditions, and literacy would be passed down. Also, I didn’t buy the fact that the species that had the technology was also the stronger physically. And, so drastically different from the Eloi in terms of physique. There’s only so much that selective breeding can do. Yes, we have Great Danes and Bull Mastiffs and Chihuahuas and Shar Peis, but have you really looked at a purebred dog? Most of them are so massively inbred that they have huge physical and emotional problems. If humanity lost all technology, there’s no way that the Morloks could have come about. Genetic drift would have killed them all in the end.
One thing Wells (both of ‘em) did right was to have the time traveler wind up in an era more primitive than the one he came from. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said that any sufficiently evolved technology will be indistinguishable from magic. Think about it – you drop someone from the steam age into the atomic age and they’re gonna freak out. You can sleep off jet lag.
Done thinkin’ now.
All in all, it’s not the smartest sci-fi ever made. Actually, I’d call it an adventure more than sci-fi. Good pulp fiction. But it has its heart in the right place.
