The Time Machine (2002) Review
5/10
A Columbia professor in 1899 loses the woman he intends to marry, builds a machine to go back and save her, discovers he can’t, and goes forward instead to ask why. The 5 is for a picture with a real premise, an excellent opening hour, and a last act that abandons the argument for a monster fight. Guy Pearce is good, Klaus Badelt’s score is better than the film deserves, and the time-lapse journey forward is the best sequence in any version of this story.
This one frustrates me more than a flat-out bad movie would. For an hour I’m completely with it: Pearce, the machine, that ride forward through the ages. Then the last act throws the book away for a punch-up, and I feel cheated out of the film the first hour promised me.
What sinks it is the Uber-Morlock. The novel is about class hardened into biology across eight hundred millennia. The film replaces that with a telepathic villain who explains the plot and then gets punched.
The Premise Change Is Good
John Logan’s screenplay adds a motive Wells never gave the Traveller. Alexander Hartdegen builds the machine to undo a death, goes back, and finds that Emma dies anyway by a different route each time he tries.
That’s a strong addition. It supplies a reason to build the thing, it establishes the rules with a demonstration instead of a lecture, and the failure sends him forward for the reason the story needs. That’s to find somebody who can explain why the past won’t move.
It also relocates the story from London to New York. It costs the film some of Wells’s specificity about Victorian England and gains a version of the journey that American audiences can read. That’s a fair trade and not a betrayal.
The first act works because it’s about a man with a problem. Pearce plays Hartdegen as an absent-minded academic who becomes obsessive, breaks a rib doing his own stunts, and holds the picture together through material that’s no monsters in it at all. Pearce is the reason I’d happily sit through that first hour again. He plays a man falling apart politely, and I believe his grief more than I believe anything the film says about time.
An adaptation is allowed to add a motive the source lacks. Wells wrote a scientific romance where the Traveller travels because he can. That works on the page and leaves a film with no engine. The test for an addition is whether it serves the original argument or replaces it. The dead fiancee serves it, because it forces Hartdegen to ask why time resists him and the answer is the whole trip.
Notice how the film teaches the rule. Emma dies twice, differently, and the audience learns that the past is fixed by watching it happen instead of being told. Demonstration beats explanation every time.
The Journey Forward Is the High Point
Hartdegen sits in the machine and the world runs past him. Seasons blur, the city rises and falls, glaciers arrive, the moon breaks apart overhead and comes down in pieces.
The camera stays with him and lets the change happen around a stationary man. That’s the correct way to shoot this and the reason the sequence lands. Time here is everything except him moving.
The lunar collapse is the film’s best invention. Wells didn’t have it, the 1960 version didn’t have it, and it supplies a cause for the ruined future that’s specific, visual and terrible. A colony went wrong and the sky fell.
That falling moon is wonderful. It’s the one idea in the picture I think Wells would have envied, and it’s done with enough conviction that I forgive the film a lot for it. Donald McAlpine shot it, Wayne Wahrman cut it, and it runs about four minutes. If the rest of the film had this much confidence in imagery over dialogue, it would be a considerably better picture.
There’s a smaller version of the same idea earlier that works just as well. Hartdegen goes forward a few decades at a time and watches the New York Public Library survive while everything around it changes. That tells you what the film thinks endures without a line of dialogue about it.
What It Removes From the Book
Wells published The Time Machine in 1895 and the Eloi and the Morlocks are an argument. Leisure class and working class, separated long enough that they became separate species, with the workers underground eventually farming the surface dwellers they once served.
That’s a political thesis delivered as horror, and it’s the reason the book has lasted a hundred and thirty years. Every part of it is available to a filmmaker. The 1960 George Pal version keeps a good deal of it.
This one keeps the imagery and discards the argument. The Eloi here are a functioning tribal society with language, buildings and skills. That makes them sympathetic and removes the point, because the horror in Wells is that they’ve been bred into helplessness.
Jeremy Irons then arrives to supply a villain. He’s buried under prosthetics that earned the film an Academy Award nomination for makeup, he explains the Morlock caste system aloud, and he converts a structural tragedy into an antagonist who can be defeated.
Irons is doing what he can under the latex, and the design is unsettling. The problem is the function. A creature that can be reasoned with, argued against and killed is a character, and Wells wrote a condition.
That creature loses me. I like Irons and I like the makeup, and neither matters once the monster starts explaining the caste system out loud like a museum guide. Wells made the horror a condition nobody could punch, and I think turning it into a boss fight was the cheap choice.
When you adapt an argument, the argument is the property. Keep the creatures and drop the thesis and you’ve licensed a monster instead of adapting a book.
The diagnostic question: can the protagonist personally defeat your antagonist? In Wells nobody can, because the enemy is eight hundred thousand years of economics. The moment the film gives that a face and a neck, the story becomes winnable and stops meaning anything. If a producer needs a villain, find one inside the original argument instead of importing one. There’s a version of this film where the Morlock leader is right about everything and can’t be argued with, and it’s far more frightening than a telepath with an accent.
The Production Fell Apart
Simon Wells, the great-grandson of the author, directed. Filming ran from February to the end of May 2001, and with about eighteen days left he was suffering from what was publicly described as extreme exhaustion. Gore Verbinski came in and shot the remainder. Wells returned for post-production. Both men are credited in some listings and the film carries Wells as director. You can see the seam if you look for it. The material with the largest creature work and the most conventional action staging sits at the end, and the end is the weakest stretch of the picture by a wide margin.
I wouldn’t lay it all on the handover. The Uber-Morlock is in Logan’s script and the structural problem predates the collapse. But a director going down with three weeks to run isn’t a condition under which anybody rescues a third act.
Verbinski went on to Pirates of the Caribbean the following year. That makes this a strange footnote in two careers at once. He was brought in to finish somebody else’s film and was about to spend a decade making his own on a much larger scale.
Where It Ends Up
Eighty million dollars, a hundred and twenty-three and a half back, mixed reviews, and one Academy Award nomination for makeup. Profitable, largely forgotten, and not disgraced by any of it. The film sits on a list of pictures that ruined the book and it deserves the place, though I’d put it in the milder category. It doesn’t misunderstand Wells. It understands him and decides the argument is less commercial than a chase.
What survives is worth having. The first hour, the lunar collapse, Pearce, Badelt’s score, and Orlando Jones as a holographic librarian who’s still running in a ruined New York Public Library eight hundred thousand years later. That’s the one Wellsian idea the film invents for itself.
Watch the 1960 version alongside it. Pal had a fraction of the resources and kept the thesis, and the comparison is the clearest available lesson about what money does and doesn’t buy an adaptation. Wells the author would have recognized one of these films and not the other.
A faithful cheap adaptation beats an expensive unfaithful one when the source’s value is an idea. Effects age. An argument that was right about people doesn’t. Identify what your source is for before you decide what to cut. If somebody asks why the book is remembered and the answer isn’t in your outline, the outline is wrong no matter how well it moves.
The commercial defense is real and worth stating. A film about hereditary class division has a smaller audience than a film about a monster. That’s a decision with a cost, and the cost here was the reason to make it at all.
The book on this: The Time Machine: The Cure sends the Time Traveller forward with a passenger, a stowaway, and a machine that slowly learns to speak, from 1895 out to a billion years.
Should you watch The Time Machine?
Watch the first hour. It’s a good film about a man who can’t accept a death, and it’s what holds this at a 5. The second hour is what keeps it from climbing any higher. The most durable idea in Victorian science fiction gets traded for a man in makeup explaining himself before a fistfight, and I resent that trade for every minute of it.
