** (out of ****)
Starring Guy Pearce, Samantha Mumba, Orlando Jones, and Jeremy Irons.
Directed by Simon Wells and written for the screen by John Logan, from the story by H.G. Wells.
2002 PG13
Reviewed in a vacuum, “The Time Machine” is not a very good movie. Compared to the H.G. Wells story and the fine George Pal film adaptation from 1960, it’s even less of a good movie. I shall attempt to examine this new film from both viewpoints. The story by Wells, and the 1960 film, are not so much science-fiction adventures as they are social commentary. The essential message of these two works is: “this is what mankind is capable of if left unchecked by a conscience. The time traveler is a device of bringing a modern sensibility to the far-off worlds of the future, where technology and human ambition are running amok. In the very far future, the time traveler finds that humanity has split into two species, one that is lazy and gets to sit in the sun all day—the Eloi—while the other species—the Morlocks—slaves endlessly in caves in order to make the world run. At first the Morlocks are getting the crummy end of the deal, until the time traveler finds out they get to periodically eat members of the Eloi.
Aha, a fascinating metaphor for class conflict, but this new “Time Machine” has little interest in social commentary. There is a smidgen of commentary, yes, when the time traveler (Guy Pearce of “Memento” and “L.A. Confidential”) visits the year 2030 and discovers that a nuclear device is set to detonate within the moon to make room for a retirement community. And the Eloi and the Morlock are present, but the new Eloi are hardworking jungle types, and therefore absolved of the class problems inherent in the original story. The Morlock eat them just to eat them and the entire thing is reduced to a dull good-versus-evil adventure with too much frenetic music.
As social criticism, we can forgive the Wells’ story and Pal’s movie their logical errata or time-traveling paradoxes. Just because this new “Time Machine” is more of a straight-ahead adventure doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie; I dimly remember as but a wee lad being entertained by an animated children’s version of “Gulliver’s Travels” in which the little people were just little people, too small for symbolism. But “The Time Machine” isn’t much of an adventure either, stumbling from point to point even more awkwardly than last year’s “Planet of the Apes.” The two main sections of the film involve the time traveler in 1890s New York, trying to build a time machine to avert a personal tragedy, and the struggle against the Morlocks in the year 800,000, which resolves itself in a fistfight and an explosion.
“The Time Machine” has a handful of interesting bits, such as the time lapse of hundreds, and then thousands of years, in which we witness the rise and fall of vines, spider webs, mountains, glaciers, oceans, and even the sun at breakneck speed. The shattered moon, blown apart by twenty megatons, is awesomely freaky, and I wish the movie had dwelled on this a little longer. Jeremy Irons has one scene as the head Morlock, in which, in addition to being well-acted, is one of the few occasions when the movie veers toward being actually about something—until he and Guy Pearce start whaling on each other. The movie’s other good scene belongs, surprisingly, to Orlando Jones, as the computer from 2030 who is still decrepitly active in the year 800,000, mourning humanity’s fate as well as his own. He remembers everything, including Pearce visiting him in 2030. Jones recalls with self-deprecating irony how condescending he was when Pearce asked about practical time travel, only to find out 797,930 years later that it wasn’t such a silly question after all.
The rest of the movie is mostly running around, smashing things, and forgettable. Perhaps most disappointing is that scope of the special effects sequences is awesome, in which mountains rise and fall and the moon comes apart. We begin to glimpse just how large the cosmos is and how long it has been around, how lonely God must be—and then “The Time Machine” climaxes with the same fistfight as a dozen other movies.
Finished March 10, 2002.
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night