“You’ve come all this way,” hisses the Uber-Morlock (Jeremy Irons), “because of two words…What if?”
Those are dangerous and crucial words in a time travel movie. What if the audience starts asking too many questions about the plot?
To begin with, this delayed Dreamworks adaptation of the classic H.G. Wells classic novel isn’t so much based on the book as it is the 1960 George Pal movie. It lifts a few set pieces straight out of that, then sticks them into a blender with modern Hollywood storytelling clichés. Screenwriter John Logan even goes for a bit of post-modern irony: the novel actually exists in the world within this movie, published eleven years before the events start. But even though Professor Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) vaguely follows the plot set out by Wells, he himself is too wrapped up in his own obsessions to notice.
It’s a fairly clever conceit. You could apply it to some of the plot holes, making it very likely that mankind’s descendants were purposely created as Morlocks and Eloi. It would give even greater weight to this movie’s two additions to the story, the Uber-Morlock and Vox (Orlando Jones), a holographic representation of the sum total of mankind’s knowledge – both characters self-aware and tragically lonely in humanity’s twilight. But if such thought existed in the screenplay, director Simon Wells (yes, H.G.’s actual great-grandson) bobbles it in favor of splashy imagery and loud explosions.
What’s left has its attractions, and it does move fast enough to avoid the usual aneurysms caused by thinking about time paradoxes. Hartdegen builds his machine, you see, in order to try to change the past. On the night of their engagement, Hartdegen’s fiancée Emma (Sienna Guillory, who looks an awful lot like Jessica Lange) dies in a tragic accident. This sends the brilliant mechanical engineer spiraling down into despair and obsession, determined to somehow prevent the accident. His interference, however, causes a different accident with the same result. (And unfortunately for the movie, as tragic as Emma’s second death should be, the theater will fill with laughter.) Because no one in 1904 New York understands quantum physics, Hartdegen decides he must go forward in time until he can find someone who will help him.
The journey takes him to 2030, where he encounters Vox, who has replaced the card catalog at the New York Public Library. So simultaneously focused and distracted is Hartdegen that a holograph (among other 2030 wonders) doesn’t phase him. (Though Vox’ rendition of the opening number from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of The Time Machine might phase you.) Instead, Hartdegen gets thrown that everyone still considers time travel impossible, and that the last major theorist on it was himself. Never mind that Vox also gives him his alleged death date; this is a very driven man.
Due to a natural disaster, the time machine stops again in 2037, with the moon crumbling and falling toward New York City. We came, we saw, we excavated and ruined its internal structure. Because of this sequence, Dreamworks held the movie back from its original November release date, a wise move. Brief as it is, and necessary to the plot, the depiction of the city essentially under attack by nature would have proved too grim for audiences last fall.
The disaster knocks Hartdegen unconscious while the machine travels blissfully forward in time some 800,000 years. There he meets Mara (pop star Samantha Mumba), who miraculously has learned to speak English from the gathered ruins of old plaques and street signs. She and the rest of the Eloi live in cliff dwellings, but remain vague about where all the old folk are, and why everyone fears the night.
If you know the story, you know the Morlocks dwell beneath, and unfortunately they look only slightly better than they did in 1960. Because the production wants them to appear to have devolved intellectually, the actors (stuntmen, really) have mechanical heads and rubber skins that look too obviously such against the completely human Eloi. What sets them apart this time around is the Uber-Morlock, subtle at first in its grotesqueness and made all the more frightening by Jeremy Irons. When he appears on-screen, it’s like Alec Guinness’ first scene in Star Wars: the quality of acting shoots up so much that you forget how average it has been up until then.
Not that Pearce doesn’t try, but what he has given for a character is something that runs counter to the action film mold it’s stuck in. Hartdegen is a man trapped in his own thoughts long before the film begins; he acknowledges to his best friend Philby (Mark Addy) that Emma is the only person really able to bring him out of himself. So Pearce plays with a depth that just doesn’t fit, especially in the second half. He seems distracted, unable to ask the piercing questions that any audience member would, like “what do you MEAN you all have the same nightmare?”
And from there it gets less than spectacular. In her screen debut, Mumba acquits herself in a part that really only requires standing around looking bemused in a leprechauny sort of way. (Yes, the Eloi speak a language unrelated to English, but they all have recognizable Irish accents anyway.)
As Hartdegen’s two closest companions, Jones and Addy wildly differ. At his best when used sparingly in a film, Jones brings an unexpected dignity to Vox, and his few scenes stand as the most memorable. Every time Addy appears, it’s memorably bad. Not a bad actor himself (and a surprisingly good Fred Flintstone), Addy has a working-man’s persona. Cast here as a 19th Century intellectual and wearing some of 2002’s most fake facial hair, he could just as easily be in a Mr. Show sketch making fun of Victorian manners.
The Time Machine won’t be the worst hour and a half you’ve ever spent, which is good, because the lesson the movie teaches is that you can’t get them back. But you may find yourself asking “What if…a big Hollywood movie dared to actually be thought-provoking, too?”
Let’s hope it doesn’t take 800,000 years for the answer.
