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.
I'm about to jump in the shower and go catch a matinee of this flick, so I don't have time for a long, drawn-out reply. But I think it will be entertaining, though after reading several reviews I expect it to be inferior to the 1960 version in all aspects except effects.
I replied mostly to complain about this continuing trend of chopping scenes out of movies so as not to offend people still haunted by the terrorist attacks. Why do The Powers That Be think we'll all be reduced to sniveling wussies if we see a skyscraper blow up in a work of *fiction*? I had hoped this practice would've run out of steam by now, six months after the fact. Memo to Hollywood: If you're so concerned about offending me, leave the 'destruction of New York' scenes in your movies, and stop labeling me and the rest of your customers as potential thieves, chomping at the bit to steal movies and music from you.
~Philly
Anyone who who even caught a sidelong glimpse of the trailers could tell this was a lame 02's remake of the superior 60's "Time Machine."
It was instantly recognizable as a dead horse straight out of the gate.
Katz actually spent good money just so he could "First Post" a review on a shitty movie?
Dude, while I don't expect more, I certainly hope for it.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
Actually, one of the comments I made to my buddies after watching the movie, was that I was impressed how _not_ slimy the Morlocks were.
They were downright creepy, a sort of cross between the "Grey Alien" look and neanderthal.
Slime is usually used to _hide_ poor costumes/effects for bad guys; it's hard to screw-up dripping. The only goo in Time Machine is the dart-poison, and the "pit".
Just like in the latest movie version of "The Count of Monte Cristo", I found they wrapped things up far too soon. Just as you start to really get into it - they realize they want to end in 5 minutes, and it's bang-bang-save-the-girl-THE-END-roll-credits.
Book adaptations should be required to be a minimum 3 hours.
While I concur that many of the special effects were quite interesting and perhaps even breathtaking, I found myself asking the same questions I was asking while watching the Planet of the Apes remake:
And a final question: Why, oh why, didn't "they" show us anything about how Hartdegen came to the conclusion that a time machine was 1) possible, and 2) doable by him? Why not show us how he went about creating the machine? I don't know about anyone else, but my heart sunk when "they" unveiled the machine--I thought "wow. outta thin air. oh boy. that's hollywood, circa 2002."
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I really doubt we needed an review of these movie as it was pretty obvious it was a twisted, hollywoodified, piece of crap version of a great story. Just look at the poster alone, the main character looks like someone from a CK commercial, theres a scantily clad chick in the background... as soon as you try to sell sex in a scifi film, 100% maximal suckage garanteed. Then the previews: everything is super duper action packed, theres CG all over the place, everything is flashing by mad fast, etc... Action packed? WTF, no need to even say anything on this one, and the fact it has CG means exactly jackshit, after all ANY hollywood-class film will be able to scrape up some money to have CG. And the excuse "I just wanted to see it for the CG" is weak as hell; You could say that about FF, Mummy2, Monsters Inc, etc, but NOT for this steaming pill. If you actually spent $9 to see this for just CG, I'd say that was pretty dumb. Sorry for the ranting, but this movie's existance angers me, especially the fact they took a great story and blantantly butchered it hollywood style.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
To see my full review, go to Peterswift.org/ html [peterswift.org]
Does Jon Katz post stuff on that web site that says "To see my full review, go to http://slashdot.org"? These are supposed to be Slashdot reader comments. If you want to advertise on Slashdot, go to this link. You will find all of the information on rates, ad types, etc.
Incredibly average movie, see at matinee price.
You can see a lot of time and money was spent and result is a so-so movie.
I think the movie succeeded in doing what the book was meant to do - it sparks the imagination! What IS the world going to be like in 800,000 years? I can't even imagine the changes that will come in the next 50! ... Let's put aside our petty concerns for a minute and remember what an important time this is to the evolution of technology.
As regards technological evolution, I note that in Wells' original, it was the Morlock's love of machines and enslavement to the idea of "mechanical progress" that led them at last to cannibalism and moral degeneracy.
The film fails, as the Pal version did in the 1960s, by dropping the key theme of Well's book: the time traveller discovers the end result of class warfare. The proles won by letting the rich think they'd won because they enjoy a life of luxury, but instead they are just cattle being fattened.
Wells was a Fabian Socialist with a huge sense of irony and these influences informed all his work. But socialism and irony is apparently too dangerous for Hollywood. Instead, Pal's film changed it into a metaphor about nuclear warfare and survivalism, and Wells Jr changes it into a metaphor about the perils of leisure development. What a crock.
The Time Machine is here. The end-of-the-earth chapter, which seems to give Katz the willies, is a perfect little End-Of-Colonialism piece, very typical of the time. Hodgson's House on the Borderland , Night Land , and Stapledon's Last and First Men are more of the same, but with their own charms.
`I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes -- to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
`It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
`So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection -- absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.
Da Blog