My wife and I went to see this over the weekend. I wasn’t expecting it to be very good, but I hadn’t seen any reviews so I went in to the theater hoping I would be wrong. Alas, I was not.
It started out well enough. The early scenes were done well enough, and it had a quirky sense of humor that I enjoyed. It had nothing to do with the book, but I’ve learned to live with that when I see movies. Basically, the inventor of the time machine is an absent-minded type who is easily distracted. He accidentally causes the death of his fiance on the night he proposes to her and loses it. He spends the next four years working on building a time machine so he can change what happened.
I thought this was a fairly interesting way to give the character some motivation and it was handled well (keep in mind that I am viewing the movie as a self-contained work unrelated to the book). When he finishes the machine we get to the first point in the movie where I had some problems with it.
He takes the machine back in time to make sure that his fiance doesn’t go to the park where she was killed, and then she’s run over by a carriage. After this happens he comes to the conclusion that you can’t change the past. I thought this was ridiculous. He obviously changed the past, she died in a completely different manner. What I expected to happen was to show the guy travelling back in time repeatedly to try and stop her death before coming to this realization but he gives up after the first try!
Anyway, after this happens he decides to travel into the future to find out why he can’t change the past. Makes sense, I guess, it would be reasonable to assume that people would learn more about time travel after it’s already been done. He goes to the year 2030.
The future New York was fairly well realized, nice special effects, didn’t go too overboard with the fancy high-tech stuff, but then, we don’t get to see much of it. We do see a commercial for a moon colony that describes how the underground chambers are created with nuclear bombs (FORESHADOWING!). He goes to a library and interacts with an artificial intelligence in the form of the 7-Up guy. The library has nothing on time travel beyond basic theory and science fiction. Time traveller becomes frustrated with the obnoxious search engine and decides he needs to go further into the future.
He starts moving further ahead but he sees something like a huge explosion only 7 years later. He stops the machine and comes out into a ruined city. He looks up and sees the moon broken into several pieces ala ‘Thundarr the Barbarian’. He’s about to be arrested by military police who are evacuating the area when he is told that we changed the orbit of the moon with the bombs they were using to hollow it out. OK, it’s not a good sign when a movie is obviously lifting ideas from a badly animated early '80s Hanna Barbera cartoon and a really bad British sci-fi series from the 70s. Anyway, he manages to escape to his machine and escape forward, but he knocks himself out and falls against one of the levers and travels hundreds of thousands of years into the future.
He wakes up in a hut reminiscent of those on Gilligan’s Island, at least at first. He tries to talk to a little boy who doesn’t seem to understand him and runs away. He follows him outside and sees that he is in a matte painting, I mean in a village of strange bamboo buildings that are hanging from the walls of a huge canyon. This scene is accompanied by annoying New Age music ala Enya. He meets up with an attractive young woman who was the one who found him in his time machine and took care of him while he was unconscious. Amazingly, she speaks perfect unaccented American English despite being born more than 800,000 years in our future. She explains that this is the ‘Stone Language’ and that it is taught to all children. If so, why didn’t the boy reply to him in English, and why does the woman have to translate for him when the rest of the village shows up? Oh well.
She tells everyone else he was hit on the head and he is a wandering idiot, but she believes his story about being a time traveller. That night he has a dream of running through some woods while spooky eyes watch him, which ends with him approaching an angular skull-shaped structure. When he wakes up he finds out that everybody has that dream, but the woman won’t explain it’s meaning.
The next day they are outside doing some kind of hunter-gatherer busy work and he asks her why there are no old people. She tells them that they go away, but doesn’t explain more. About this time they are attacked by the Morlocks.
Morlocks are CGI creatures that look like vaguely reptillian apes. They shoot people with blowgun darts that are covered with a smelly sticky substance, then they sniff out the people who were marked, tie them up, and run away with them. There is no explanation for why they shoot them with the darts first, as they are obviously not drugged or poisoned. The time traveller fights one of them to rescue the kid but is about to get whupped when all the Morlocks run off and sink into the ground. The cute woman was taken, too. When he asks he finds out that nobody knows where they go with them and nobody ever comes back once the Morlocks take them. Nobody has ever considered fighting the Morlocks either, though they are not THAT formidable.
The kid tells him of a place with ghosts, so he goes there for more info. He discovers a cave with the computer core that held the artificial 7-Up guy, who is still functional after 800,000 years though a bit worse for wear. He provides exposition, telling how humanity split into two species, one that lives underground and one that lives above ground and is prey to the first. He also tells them where the entrance to the Morlocks caves are, which he knows about because one of the Eloi escaped and told him. This person who told him apparently died in the cave because his skeleton is still there. Why they did not return to the village is a mystery, as it can’t be very far away since the kid led him from there to the cave.
Time travelling guy goes to the entrance, which is the angular skull-shaped structure that I guess is supposed to be menacing. He crawls down the hole and finds caves full of Morlocks and big primitive machines. Around this time I had to go pee, so I missed what happened next. When I came back he had been captured by Jeremy Irons in white face paint and long hair. He is apparently the psychic leader of the Morlocks, and he too speaks perfect English and is very reminiscent of every effeminate Disney villain. They talk back and forth about stuff uninteresting enough for me to forget in 2 days, and end up fighting in the time machine, which is lowered on an elevator. Head Morlock also induces a hallucination for the time traveller that shows how things might have been different had his fiance not been killed.
BTW, I found out from my wife that while I was gone the head Morlock explained how he was going to use the cute woman for breeding purposes instead of food, apparently the Morlocks can’t breed by themselves anymore. Huh.
Anyway, they fight on the machine, evil Morlock-dude is knocked out of it so he’s barely hanging on, time traveller shoots machine into the future and evil Morlock-dude rots away to nothing before our eyes. In the even further future everything is red and there are lots of angular skull Morlock cave entrances. He returns to the time he just left and rescues the woman. The Morlocks are coming though and he says he is going to change the future. He rigs the time machine to just sit there spinning and creating a light show and they start climbing out of the tunnels, pursued by Morlocks. The time machine keeps spinning up until it seems to implode and send this wave of special effects throughout the tunnels that makes all the Morlocks wither away into nothing. Somehow he managed to make it to a hill overlooking the area while all the Morlocks were still inside, even though they were right on his heels as he was climbing out and were much faster than humans. Having successfully committed genocide, they live happily ever after.
When I left the theater my wife asked me what I thought of it, I gave it one and a half stars. Turns out this is the same rating Roger Ebert gave it. The beginning was good, and the special effects were very good in places though they were very uneven. That’s about the best I can say about it, though.
