THE TIME MACHINE (2002)
A mess, but not an uninspired one
This loose (loose, I say!) adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel is so wildly hit-and-miss I'm tempted to try to point fingers and blame the things that don't work on...somebody. (the scene of the moon falling on New York City is visually unimpressive! Damn you, Osama bin Laden!) But no, as it is with any patchwork movie-by-committee, blame is irrelevant. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work - there'll be no going back to the drawing board here. (no, I don't intend to let that stop me from pointing fingers regarding other movies when I know who to point them at)

Guy Pearce stars as Alexander Hartdegen, one of those socially awkward, goggly-eyed scientists who, despite having no apparent social skills and a tendency to write loooooooong equations on chalk boards for years on end, has managed to secure the affections of a lovely lady. One night in the park, he asks her to marry him, but then she's killed by a robber. Nothing kills the romance in a proposal like the bride getting shot to death. So Hartdegen spends four years obsessively working on building a time machine so he can go back and prevent her death, which he does...for about ten minutes (knowing snicker when he leaves her in the street alone while he gets her some flowers). This guy just can't catch a break! So he travels into the future for answers to why she'd still be killed despite having been rescued. (I told you it was a loose adaptation)

When it comes to time-travel stories, there are two schools of thought which people subscribe to. There are some people who believe that time-travel paradoxes (i.e. people trying to make sure their actions in the past don't change the future in a way that nullifies their own existence and thus renders them unable to change the past and...) are what makes these stories fun. And there are others, who believe that they suck the fun right OUT of the stories. I happen to fall into the latter camp, and that's one of the scattershot things The Time Machine gets right in my book.

When Hartdegen goes into the past to "rescue" his wife, he rapidly takes her away from the scene of her murder, avoiding the (unspoken) possibility of running into himself. At no time does he ever have to much worry about ensuring the intact continuance of his existence - the marginal explanation why comes very late in the film, and while it mightn't hold up to much scrutiny to paradox-fans, I couldn't care less - it did it for me.

Hartdegen's first stop in the future is in the year 2030, where he goes to the library and consults with the interactive memory core, which is like a compendium of all knowledge known to man, in the form of Orlando Jones talking to you in a sheet of glass stood on end. (in one of this movie's dumber decisions, this scene makes direct reference to Wells' book, the first movie based on it, and the musical...good thing he didn't let Hartdegen know about the Morlocks and the Eloi in advance) We hear a lot about how a 20-megaton warhead is going to be detonated on the moon to make way for a retirement community. Seven years later, this gone-disastrously-wrong plan dooms all of mankind to near-extinction. (damn you, senior citizens!)

Then, knocked unconscious in the machine, Hartdegen slumps on the "forward!" lever and comes to eight hundred thousand years later, when there are Morlocks and Eloi and the movie just stops dead. The movie might have been hit n' miss up to this point, but it was reasonably inventive and there wasn't the "been there, done that" pall of these scenes. Granted, the Morlocks and the Eloi are some of the few things which this movie has in common with the book. But I never found that aspect of the book that interesting, and it isn't that interesting here...until Jeremy Irons comes in. (I don't know what has happened with his fortunes in recent years, but he seems to be slumming with alarming frequency lately)

The Eloi here are more articulate than ever before - I seem to remember them being pretty, and friendly, but dumb, in both senses of the word. Here, they have their own language and culture, and some of them even speak English, based on a handful of long-lasting storefront signs. Some don't speak English when we first see them, but do a few scenes later. Still, most importantly, they're all a bunch of wimps, running in terror from the occasional Morlock attack, unable to even conceive of fighting back.

So, yeah, I was cheering for the Morlocks. Oh, c'mon, admit it, everybody always cheers for the Morlocks. The Eloi are too stupid to cheer for. I wanted to see those Eloi carried off by the boatload, particularly annoying Space-channel personality Natasha Eloi (STOP MOVING YOUR HEAD!!!), unfortunately, nowhere to be seen in this film.

Ah yes, Jeremy Irons...the Morlocks are led by a subterranean telepathic mutant (again, with the subterranean telepathic mutants) played by Jeremy Irons. Once he shows up, the movie really picks up. Hell, I'd love to see a movie which featured this guy as a villain all the way though...I feel kinda ripped off that he's only here at the end. The character looks great, Irons' performance is elegant, hammy, and slime-dripping at the same time, and his lines are so much better than everybody else's, one has to wonder if another writer was called in to write for him.

The rest of the Morlocks are ugly and not really convincingly lifelike, leaping about as if fired by catapults, diving down unimpeded into sand, faces not very articulate at all. Sure, I liked their waste-pit where the ribcages of countless ill-fated Eloi float in viscera and Morlock bowel movements, but when the creatures neither look nor act very interesting, on top of the retread feel of these scenes, it's just puttin' me to sleep.

In terms of logic, The Time Machine is a bit of a mess. Director Simon Wells (H.G.'s grandson, I believe) can't seem to make up his mind as to whether the machine is visible from the outside or not while operating. Things (or people) which are hanging half in and half out of the machine while it's travelling through time are affected in ways which are interesting, if easily defeated by the application of just a little sense.

The interactive library memory core remaining active for eight hundred thousand years seems like a stretch - I picked on the thousand-year-old Harriers in Battlefield Earth, it wouldn't be fair of me to overlook this - but I can at least accept it, a little, since it's an interactive library memory core from the future. Who knows, maybe by 2030 we'll have Duracells that last damn near a million years. I'm just wondering how Jones was able to reach beyond the glass projecting screen to caress the skull of a long-dead companion.

There are a lot of good effects here, particularly the travels forward in time, as New York is developed from an early-20th-Century metropolis into an early-21st-Century metropolis, and later, as the surrounding area undergoes eight hundred thousand years of geological and ecological upheaval. Okay, so maybe the quality of the effects isn't that hot, but I appreciate it when a movie takes the trouble to show me something cool that I haven't seen before.

The score by three people (!) manages to be heroic and schmaltzy at the same time, like one of those Manowar ballads about honor and glory, and when it's not like that, it's got that "tribal children" thing going on.

And the ending...well, Irons' character offered Hartdegen an intelligent (if kinda cold) way to end the story, and instead, the movie opts for a crowd-pleaser ending which disappoints on a few levels.

This movie starts and stops like a tractor without a serious transmission problem, but at least when it's moving, it's fitfully entertaining. It's a mess, but I for one am glad that it took as many storytelling liberties as it did, and I'm even more glad it wasn't one of those paradox-resolution-type movies. Proceed with caution.

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