The National Daily World Enquiring Globe

Film Review - Time Machine, The

You have to ask yourself what you would do if you had a time machine. I'd go back and get much better grades in school.

If Prof. Alexander Hartdegen had a time machine, he'd go back and save Emma Malloy from being shot to death, or trampled by a motor car, or any of the ways she dies. Hartdegen learns with his time machine that you can't change the past in a significant way, only the minor details.

Heart broken, he heads into the future.

Director Simon Wells' re-make of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is a more up-to-date version of his Great-grandfather's science fiction classic. Author Wells guessed at how the rest of the 20th century would turn out. Director Wells saw it happen. So a little revising here and there has really made this a fine movie as we see how humans managed to kill most of themselves off in the 21st century.

While trying to colonize the moon, we manage to blow it up. I'm guessing some one doing calculations forgot to carry a 1 in their figures. Hartdegen witnesses this as he leaves the very beginning of the 20th century on a journey 800,000 years into the future.

The Time Machine is incredible eye-candy, Hartdegen watches New York being built up, the moon's destruction. Then, as he is escaping chunks of moon falling all around him, he is knocked out and wakes in the distant future.

Mankind is much smaller in number. Who we would recognize as human, the Eloi, are being hunted by the Morlocks. Soon Hartdegen is on a rescue mission to find where the Morlocks have taken a woman he has becomes emotionally involved with.

This is an old story, and I'm not really giving anything away. The Morlocks are an off-shoot of the human genome. They are predators and humans are prey. It's as simple as that. What doesn't work in this story from a biology stand point is the idea that there is an Uber-Morlock who is mostly brain, and the other Morlocks are just stupid lackeys blindly doing what they are told. This only happens in mammals when the individuals work at large corporations.

This was a fun movie. As I said the modernization and the eye-candy keep it going. Boiled down this story worked better if you were reading it in the 19th century because you probably wouldn't have known the inaccuracies. Other than a weak ending, I really liked the film.

Jammed Pipe!

Film Facts

Directed by Simon Wells

Released in 2002

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Reviewed by Mongo