Post by StevePulaski on May 18, 2016 15:45:22 GMT -5
The Time Machine (2002)
Directed by: Simon Wells
Directed by: Simon Wells
Guy Pearce in The Time Machine.
Rating: ★★
The Time Machine, an adaptation of the 1895 H.G. Wells novel and a remake of the 1960 film, starts off interesting enough, focusing on Dr. Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce), a young inventor teaching at Columbia University in 1899. His closest friend is his colleague David Philby (Mark Addy), who laughs at the fact that Alexander would rather conduct research than handle pursue a more conventional route rooted in business and management. Soon after Dr. Alexander leaves the classroom one day to go on a walk with his fiancee Emma (Sienna Guillory), a scuffle between a mugger and Alexander leaves Emma shot and killed in Alexander's arms.
We then fast-forward four years later, where we see that Alexander has been working on a time machine to take him back to the past to prevent the death of his fiancee and have the wedding he never had. When his initial attempt at going back to the moment she was killed has her being killed by a horse, Alexander travels further in the future, trying to find a time where time travel is possible. During the process, he is knocked unconscious and winds up in the year 802,701 a number and year almost unfathomable to grasp.
Alexander discovers the human race is back to leading a primal lifestyle. The human survivors are now known as "Eloi" and live on the remains of Manhattan, with only few of them speaking English. One woman named Mara (Samantha Mumba) winds up nursing Alexander back to health and informs him that the Eloi are under attack by vicious monsters known as "Morlocks" that are working to make the Eloi extinct. Alexander, who simply wanted a second chance with his wife, is suddenly plunged in a world where he may be the last hope of survival for the Eloi people.
The falling-off point for The Time Machine, which is directed by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H.G. Wells, is when Alexander transports to the year of 802,701, a dingy, gloomy landscape that overtakes the screen and works to almost entirely mute the imagination of the film's verisimilitude. The initial interactions between Alexander and David have a certain amiability without the exchange of insults or jabs at egos that was so quietly remarkable, I kind of wish we got to see more of it. Better yet, in an attempt at compromise, if David wound up going with Alexander, that could've set up more potential narrative possibilities.
And yes indeed, some comic possibilities as The Time Machine is criminally robbed of a sense of humor. This is also to the fault of Pearce, who tries to play serious in a film where his character was lobbed 8,000 years in the future with the help of a time machine that was capable of producing little other than whirling, dizzying spheres of light and a woeful miscalculation. Jeremy Irons winds up playing a Morlock/human-hybrid, and to his credit, succeeds in his role just by the sheer absurdity of it. Contrasted with Pearce, it's a night and day difference on how to approach a film that's so goofy for more reasons than the fact that it embraces the concept of time travel.
Time travel is already such a lucid and inane concept that it owes itself to a lot of fun sequences and perhaps, optimistically speaking, some experimentation and The Time Machine lacks in both departments. By the time it reached its conclusion, it had wore me down with its drab cinematography and lackluster attempt at providing engaging characters and a cogent plot that when the Eloi people go on to battle the Morlocks, it feels like the most cloying and perfunctory battle that simply stands in the way of the closing credits. There's an audience for this kind of movie and The Time Machine will likely go on to offend them.
Starring: Guy Pearce, Samantha Mumba, Jeremy Irons, Mark Addy, and Sienna Guillory. Directed by: Simon Wells.