Slashdot Mirror
Review: The Time Machine
Everybody has his own favorite, but The Time Machine has to rank way up there as one of the best, darkest and most prescient futuristic yarns ever spun. But while Jackson was able to infuse his movie with the spirit of Tolkien's story, indiscriminate special effects and limpid, forgettable acting leach H.G. Wells and his eerily dark vision of the future out of this one. Reading A Time Machine, you always felt humanity would pay dearly for its arrogance one day. Seeing this movie, you just end up looking at your watch.
For some reason, the locale of this film has moved from London to New York. Why? You get the feeling the producers were trying to make this movie a bit of a cautionary nuclear tale. Then the movie was delayed by 9/11, because it originally contained (and still does) some destruction-of-Manhattan sequences, most removed. Film essayists will have a field day in a few years de-constructing post and pre-9/11 Hollywood.
Guy Pearce plays the brooding, tragic scientist Alexander Hartdegen, Jeremy Irons the Uber-Morlock. Irons is great. Pearce is strangely miscast here, alternately twitchy, sweaty, distracted and simply inarticulate. If you haven't read the book, you have no idea what his motivations are, who he's is involved with, or why he's making so many staggering decisions about the human race all by himself, in a mili-second. But it's Hollywood silly, so it's all about the girl, in this time or another. This profoundly trivializes the story. The ending of The Time Machine is one of the great closings in all sci-fi, but here it has all the punch of some wet paper towels.
Increasingly, from the Star Wars series to this movie, special effects are becoming a problem for sci-fi movies. All of the bad guys look alike (the Morlocks could slip easily into Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes, or Return of the Mummy). Hollywood's ideas about villains are less effective than Wells prose. Enough, already, with these special-effect monsters who are all alike: loud, bug-eyed, simian, fast-moving, cannibalistic, slimy.
In the novel, Hartdegen was brave, angry, philosophical and passionate. Here, Pearce mostly seems to have been clubbed in the head early on and remains largely insensate. Aside from taking on the class issues -- one species above ground, the other below -- Wells was joining Shelley and Verne in squaring off on tech arrogance, something very much alive, especially in America, at the opening of the 21st century. That theme is almost completely obscured here, apart from a lame cautionary alarm that one of Hartdegen's friends sounds about scientists' uncertainty about where they are going. Against a backdrop of growing hysteria about suitcase-sized dirty bombs being detonated in our major cities by enraged working class kids from foreign cultures, the themes of The Time Machine are more, not less, powerful.
The actual time travel is pretty neat -- fast and beautiful -- but that accounts for only about 15 minutes of this movie. When we're not zipping ahead in time, the movie becomes simplistic and soulless. Mostly, it's just flat. Sadly, you can give it a pass, and that's a pity, an opportunity squandered. We're not going to get another remake of this book anytime soon.
A preview is available at UpcomingMovies.com
The official site is here.
I went and saw "The Time Machine" on Friday....the theatre (being UA) sucked...and the movie didn't really help it. I was a little worried about the movie when I first walked in the theater and found it practically empty. I liked the beginning of the movie (there was a beautifal continuous shot down a flight of steps and through some hallways), and even up to the first time travel. However, after Alexander reached the far future...the whole movie went down hill. First of all, the civilization looked EXACTLY like the communities in Riven, and the underground world looked exactly like Isengard in "The Fellowship of the Rings". The time travel was cool, but as Katz mentioned, there wasn't much. I expected a LOT more as far as character development and more of an actual story. So much was left unexplained and the ending didn't really help. So, I rate this movie fairly low. To see my full review, go to Peterswift.org/html
A quote from my review: "If they had added some monkeys and woodchucks in random places in the movie, it would have been far more interesting and entertaining.
The anti-salmon
We should all be immensely grateful to the British social class system. It inspired some of the greatest fantasy and sci-fi writers in modern literature, from Mary Shelley and Jules Verne to H.G. Wells.
Ummmm, John? Jules Verne was French so how exactly was he influenced by the British social class system?
I was going to get all defensive, but after reading your criticisms, I have to agree with you. Most of the stuff you mentioned could have been cut.
The irritating thing about LoTR was the changes he made were defended by "it would fit into Tolkien's universe if it happened this way". Of course, that's not much of an excuse; if Tolkien wanted Arwen to be involved at the Ford, he would have written it that way.
That being said, I thought it was a great movie (and I'm using "great" in the appropriate sense, not the mindless hype-ish "great" that everyone else tosses around), if not a great adaptation.
For those interested in reading the original, the text is available online here (ASCII text) or here (same, zip'ed), courtesy of project Gutenberg.
Consider this the ultimate spoiler.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
Katz, check your data! Jules Verne was French!
Right... Take Your Money Everywhere was the slogan. I still call them that, but it really confuses people out of this area.