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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.
You try fitting in 400 (I forget the exact count and it depends on the version anyways) pages, 9+ fully developed charcters, numerous subplots and a heap of other stuff in a 3 hr movie. For the most part I believe that translating a book into a is almost impossible. My general rule of thumb is "good book=bad movie" and "good movie=bad book", there is simply too many differences between the genres. When it comes to FoTR and Peter Jackson I personally think he did an admirable job, and made quite a good movie(I havn't talked to someone who didn't like it yet). I heard the origional movie was 6 hr long, you can see the evidence all over the place, I don't remember Gandalf ever teling Sam to stay with Frodo in the movie (I could be wrong there) although Sam states it numerous times, and did you notice the three stone trolls in the background when they're camping at night when the only mention of them was made in the party at the begainning. Where would you of fitted all the extra depth that you claim is so lacking? I personally hope that when it comes out on DVD it will include the FULL 6hr movie also. Can you imagine all 3 of them together in uncut form, 18 straight hr of LOTR!!! (then again it might be better to watch them over a few days;)
I stole this Sig
I have to agree with you. I went and saw it yesterdady with a few of my friends (the 3 of us increased the population of the theatre by 150%)
the effects were very well done, but the story lacked a lot. My main gripe with it, is that it doesn't really follow the book. (though honestly, IIRC if they stuck to Wells' view of the future, everyone would have fallen asleep).
The movie does however bring up 2 philosophical issue that I found rather interesting
1) Humanity has to think about what it is doing, never knowing what might happen down the line in N year
2) what would happen if someone could travel into the past and attempt to change things. though for another interesting view on this one, read some Heinlein.
I think Holywood needs to leave Cliche movies, but the problem with that is, they have their tried and true money-making plans, which ends up producing cliche movies
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
We're approaching the third anniversity of the Columbine shootings. Right after they occured NBC aired the epic made-for-TV movie "Atomic Train" everywhere in the country except the Denver market.
It seems they were afraid that we would have such febble minds we couldn't distinguish between the reality of Columbine and a fictional account of a nuclear explosion near town.
My mother taped it for me, and I passed it around to my friends. I find it hard to imagine anyone taking the story seriously, and if you have any real technical knowledge the story was absolutely incomprehensible.
Hollywood movies can get it right, but it's extremely rare. For every Terminator 2 or True Lies, you have a hundred Armaggedons(sp).
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Jeremy Irons got only a few minutes of screen time, but managed to make far more of an impact on my mind than Pearce.
I wasn't expecting such a nuanced character, though I think that probably owes more to Irons than the screenwriter.
Orlando Jones' character was also highly interesting, and got very little screen time. Like Irons his attempts to communicate on a more interesting and philosophical level is ignored by Pearce's self-absorbed character, who's obsessed with saving his new chippie. Why is it that Hollywood scientists invariably are incredibly uncurious would-be action heroes who rarely do any actual science?
It looks like they've turned the Morlocks into orcs. D'uh! In the book, they're pretty pathetic, lemur-like creatures. Devolved working-class folk.
I caught a few interesting things during my re-read. On his return journey to the future, the Time Traveller packs "a Kodak." Imagine, product placement, in 1898!
--Stefan
It's hard to believe, but at the time the book was written the world appeared both a lot younger, and with a comparitively short future. It won't be giving anything away to note that in one scene, the Time Traveller (he's never named) visits the Earth in 800,000 A.D. The sun is swollen and red, and things are starting to run down. The notions of radioactivity and fusion hadn't been concieved yet, and it was reasonable to guess that the sun only had a million or so years of life left!
This movie sucked.
I saw it last night with some friends.
Lets give it a run down.
1. That damn trailer for "Spirit" needs to be cut, it almost made me walk out of the theatre.
2. I did like the walking down the hallway scene, that was kinda cool.
3. I could understand how hollywood would want to make it a better plot by having the guy go back to save his gal, but the 4 years he was working on the machine, it gave no detail on how it was built, how it worked, etc. Which i guess is better than making something up though and making it sound stupid like "it works on the plank reaction of sub-atomic quarks in the 5th dimension" or something.
4. The Morlocks where freakin scary looking, I almost jumped out of my seat when the first one jumped in front of the screen.
5. The Eloi looked like mullato's, and thats it, in millions of years, alot more evolution should have happened, look at the morlocks!
6. I remember hearing about in the book (I haven't read it yet, but I am going to) that some eloi fasted because the Morlocks controlled them through their food. In the movie it just had that stupid dream, and thats it!
7. "Just follow the breathing" WTF!!! Ok, that iron face thing was in the dream, but how in the hell did the guy know how to get there?!
8. That computer, how the fuck was it powered for 30 million years, no less, how did it stay intact, etc.
Thats about it.
There was this woman in front of me I just about killed. She laughed at everything. "So help me I'll resequence your DNA" "HHAHAHAHAHAHAH, AHAHAHA, HAHAHHAHA, DNA!!! HAHAHA"
!!!!ARGHH!!!!!
She even laughed at the Eloi language. I hate freakin stupid people.
This article focuses on Pearce and the problems with the movie. He's amazingly outspoken and critical of the movie and the whole process that created it -- something I think the studios would be all over him for, especially so close to the opening. But I guess, happily, it's not like the old days where studios owned stars.
Also interesting (to me, at least!): Director Simon Wells is the great-grandson of H.G. Wells.
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Has anyone read "A Light in the Void", by Poul Anderson?
This was a similar story. The inventor created a time machine, but found that the farther he ventured into the future, the more energy was required to go back (it was exponential) After his third jump into the future he was unable to to his original time, so he continued to move forward - hoping technology would advance to the point that he could get back to where he started from. Along the way, there were at least 3 subplots that he was involved with in some way, even if he was just passing though.
I can't find much about it on the web. I guess it wasn't that popular?