Time Machine

Movie Title: The Time Machine	[Ads/google-ads3.htm]
Official Website (it might still work): The Time Machine
Rating (out of 10): 4
Reviewed By: Michael Stevens
Buy the: Video/DVD \| Soundtrack
The Review:

Have you ever made a mistake, or have a regret that you wish you could go back in time to fix? I know there are a few things in my past that I’d like to change, however I think I’m too lazy to take the effort to build a time machine (plus I’m not sure if it is even possible). Of course I’m not the first person to ponder this question, in fact Mr. H.G. Wells was writing about this very topic way back in 1895 before we could even fly (in airplanes). Then someone in Hollywood thought that this situation would work well in a movie, and so they made a movie based on Wells’ work. That was decades ago. So then someone in Hollywood figured if we add a lot of special effects to this story then we can make a lot of money, and so they did.

The movie itself begins in the 1880s in good old New York City where a young professor at Cornell is very busy working on various experiments and hypothesis that he hopes will change the world. This professor Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce from Memento and The Count of Monte Cristo) is also in love with the beautiful Emma (Sienna Guillory) and plans on proposing to her. Well after a romantic walk through Central Park, Alexander proposes to Emma and she accepts. Then comes the bad news as the two are mugged, and then Emma gets shot trying to keep her ring. Emma dies rather quickly, leaving the professor heartbroken and in shock. Well, the applied physics prof can’t handle this, so he buries himself in his work, which we learn is developing a machine to travel through time in. Then a few years pass and Alex isn’t even talking to his best friend Dr. Philby (Mark Addy from A Knight’s Tale), who stops by Alex’s house to try and get Alex to come out and play. This doesn’t work, and neither does the prodding by his housekeeper Mrs. Watchit (Phyllida Law). So off Alex goes to the past to save Emma from the bad guy in his time machine. Once he has gone back in time, he saves Emma from the mugger, but she ends up getting killed in a carriage accident. Somehow this makes him wonder if he can ever change the past, so he then heads to the future to see if they have any answers. Alex ends up in our not too distant future where they are building colonies on the moon and where holographic entities provide knowledge at the library. At the library Alex interacts with Vox (Orlando Jones, Evolution), one of these holograms that knows everything, except things about time travel. So off to the future he goes again, this time only a short time into the future where NYC looks like a war zone. He learns that engineers fucked up building the Moon colonies and caused the moon to fall apart, and thus screwing up Earth. Alex barely escapes this place, but is knocked unconscious as his machine rapidly accelerates into the future, where he wakes up 800,000 years later. At this point in time the Earth as dramatically changed, and so has the human race. In fact there are basically two human races, the people who live on the surface that look a lot like you and me, and the subterranean Moorlocks that look like zombies. So now we have to learn if Alex can go back and change the past, or if this is even possible.

As some people have probably learned, one of H.G. Wells relatives (Simon Wells) was the director for this film, along with Gore Verbinski. David Duncan gets credit for the screenplay, which he actually wrote for the original film back in 1960. Other important cast members are Yancey Arias, Jeremy Irons (Dungeons & Dragons), Omero Mumba, Samantha Mumba, Michael Chaturantabut, Philip Bosco, and some others.

Personally, I have never read the Wells novel, and I have only seen bits and pieces of the 1960 film, so I do not know how true to form this edition is to the previous renditions. As many Hollywood films are these days, Time Machine relies heavily on the use of special effects to keep the audience entertained. And though the special effects are nice, they don’t make the story, which just doesn’t seem plausible to me. Obviously the future will turn out however it will, and that could go an infinite different ways, but I don’t think this vision of the future will play out. Also, most people can figure out why Alex can’t save Emma even before he tries. The acting was so-so, and the visuals were great. No nudity, and it felt like I’d seen some of the footage before (the trip 800,000 years into the future looked much like time passing in A.I.). However, Time Machine wasn’t completely boring, so it gets four couches out of ten.