A Load of Old Morlocks

From the Hootoo Archive. Originally published 13th June 2002:

HG Wells has an enviable track record as far as big-screen adaptations of his books are concerned: The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds and The Shape of Things to Come have all been made into classic movies, although the less said about Food of the Gods and The Island of Doctor Moreau the better. It’s not surprising. Wells virtually invented most of the standard SF plots and there’s nothing like the aroma of literary respectability to entice movie moguls.

Which brings us to the new version of The Time Machine, directed by Simon Wells (yup, his great-grandson) and starring Guy Pearce. Pearce plays Alexander Hartdegen, a physics professor in 1890s New York, whose life is turned upside down when his sweetheart (Sienna Guillory) is accidentally killed. Devastated, Hartdegen resolves to go back in time and prevent her death and to do so constructs the titular Machine (not bad considering his only previous invention seems to have been an electric toothbrush). Little does he realize that this is the start of an odyssey that will eventually transport him 800,000 years into the future…

Positive points first: Simon Wells has clearly revelled in his chance to handle the family silver and visually the film is hugely impressive. All the different settings look superb and the actual time travel sequences are breathtakingly well-conceived and executed. The Machine itself looks magnificent, a whirling contraption of brass and crystal, every steampunk’s dream. Pearce is faintly endearing as the lead and Mark Addy and Phyllida Law are excellent in too-small parts as his friends back home.

And, if you’re unfamiliar with the rather fab 1960 film and especially the original novel, you’ll probably enjoy this a lot, provided you don’t concentrate too hard on the logic of the plot. But if you do know the story, well… The meat of Wells’ book, the world of the Eloi (principally played by Irish popstrel Samantha Mumba and her brother Omero) and the Morlocks (most notably embodied by Jeremy Irons), doesn’t appear until halfway through a not very long film. And, along with the rest of the story, it’s been contaminated by a sadly-familiar sentimentality.

HG Well’s time traveller went into the future motivated only by the spirit of scientific enquiry, and what he found was a grim vision of a world populated by two equally degenerate species evolved from mankind (a then-topical satire on the English class system). But Simon Wells’ hero originally travels through time searching for a way to mend his broken heart (all say ‘Aahhh’), and the Eloi he meets aren’t degenerate, but noble, windmill-building savages who just need a kick up the fundament to sort them out and reawaken the American spirit. The Morlocks, of course, remain impressively vile and are clearly bad to the bone (and, by the way, the scene where they hunt the Eloi could come straight from either version of Planet of the Apes). The rough outline of Wells’ story remains intact but its intent and meaning have been removed entirely in favour of heroic daring-do and an upbeat happy ending.

It’s a vaguely unsatisfying ending, too, and not just because it deviates from the source quite radically: the new Time Machine dares to dip its toe into the murky waters of temporal mechanics and the possibility of changing history. This sort of thing is plot anti-matter, potentially a brilliant source of ideas, but almost impossible to use without utterly destroying the integrity of the story. This film, after looking distinctly wobbly on this count for most of its length, seems to pull it off by proposing a rationale for time travel and changing history that actually makes sense… but then almost straight away it abandons these rules in order to provide the happy ending I mentioned earlier.

(There’s also a fantastically smug and irritating scene where Pearce visits a library in 2030 and finds Wells’ original novel and the 1960 movie referred to by name as works of fiction. So why isn’t this version listed? It’s the only bit of the film that doesn’t ring true: it’s intrusive and gimmicky and it doesn’t work.)

Still, The Time Machine is such a fantastic story it’s almost impossible to muck it up completely. This isn’t as good story-wise as the novel or the George Pal version, but it’s a visually striking, old-fashioned adventure. Worth going to see, but try not to think about the plot too much.