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In the second major film adaptation of H. G. Wells’ classic
novel, director Simon Wells moves much further away from the source
than did the 1960 film of the same name. In fact, aside from a
few basic structural similarities, it is completely different.
Unfortunately, that difference is largely for the worse.
In this version, Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce), who plays Wells’
originally nameless time traveler, travels through the future
because he’s looking for an answer as to how he can change
the past. How going into the future is going to help him do that
is never explained, but then again, not much is. So we just take
it for granted and go with it.
Alex eventually finds himself in the world of the innocent Eloi
and the Eloi eating Morlocks (who apparently do just fine in the
daylight.) The visual world that has been created here is really
pretty nice. In this world, the Eloi live on the side of cliffs
– I guess they’re protected there from the Morlocks,
but I think it’s really just because it looks cool. The
Morlock world, in contrast with the Eloi world, looks something
like the Indiana Jones Disneyland ride. We never actually feel
like we’re off a set – it’s a far cry from what
The Lord of the Rings previously
produced underground.
The story takes a strange turn as it introduces the main bad guy
(Jeremy Irons), some kind of uber-Morlock, who controls the minds
of the Eloi and Morlocks. Jeremy Irons does a great job of being
creepy but the character feels like an unnecessary addition, most
likely added so that there was a single major antagonist –
or a another character they could make a toy figure out of.
In The Time Machine, not only do we lose all sense of
the original themes of the novel, but we don’t get any real
ideas at all. The concept of time and changing the past are more
profoundly dealt with in Back to the Future than they are here.
The ending is as improbable as the rest of the film, but hey,
this is science fiction – with an emphasis on the fiction.
For all its seemingly purposeless events, though, The Time
Machine still manages to be a fairly fun ride for a moment.
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