The Time Machine (2002 film)
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| The Time Machine | |
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 Promotional poster for The Time Machine |
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| Directed by | Simon Wells |
| Produced by | Walter F. Parkes David Valdes |
| Written by | H. G. Wells (novel) David Duncan (earlier screenplay) John Logan (screenplay) |
| Starring | Guy Pearce Jeremy Irons Orlando Jones Samantha Mumba Mark Addy Phyllida Law Sienna Guillory |
| Music by | Klaus Badelt |
| Editing by | Wayne Wahrman |
| Distributed by | DreamWorks (USA) Warner Bros. (worldwide) |
| Release date(s) | March 8, 2002 |
| Running time | 96 min |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $80 million |
| IMDb profile | |
The Time Machine is a 2002 science fiction film adapted from the 1895 novel The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. It was directed by Simon Wells, who is the great-grandson of the original author, and stars Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons, Orlando Jones, Samantha Mumba, Mark Addy, Sienna Guillory, and Phyllida Law with a cameo by Alan Young who also appeared in an earlier film adaptation: The Time Machine (1960). The 2002 film is set in New York instead of London and contains new story elements not present in the original novel, including a romantic back story and several new characters, such as an artificial intelligence played by Orlando Jones.
The film was generally not well received among critics, many of whom regarded it as simply eye candy with an illogical, shallow story. A few, however, thought that it offered the potential for social commentary not present in the earlier 1960s film.
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[edit] Plot
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The plot summary in this article or section is too long or detailed compared to the rest of the article. Please edit the article to focus on discussing the work rather than merely reiterating the plot. |
Alex Hartdegen is a scientist living in 1899 New York City. Obsessed with the idea of time travel, he teaches at Columbia University as a professor of "Applied Mechanics and Engineering" and gets into trouble for his radical theories. He is a pen pal of Albert Einstein. As he goes to the park to meet his girlfriend Emma, he becomes distracted by an early motor car beside the park gates. He puts himself in immediate good fortune with the driver who, while refueling, forgot to activate the parking brake – something Alexander does quickly when it threatens get out of control.
Forgetting the flowers, he meets Emma at the skating rink; they walk through the park where Alexander proposes to Emma. However, the romantic moment is short-lived: a robber emerges from nearby bushes and holds a gun on them. As the thug attempts to take Emma's engagement ring, Alexander tries to intervene; during the struggle, the gun goes off and Emma is fatally wounded, dying in Alexander's arms. For the next four years, Alexander spends every waking hour in his laboratory working on his time travel calculations. Eventually, he succeeds in building a working time machine.
His self-imposed exile has led to him being ostracized from his oldest friend David Philby, who eventually arrives at the lab to confront Alexander who in turn flies into a rage. Philby invites Alexander to dinner in the hope it would cause him to leave the lab and eventually return to a normal life, but Alexander postpones the dinner until the following week; after Philby has left Alexander remarks that in a week they "wouldn't have had this conversation".
With the time machine finished, he travels back to that night four years ago and intercepts Emma before she was destined to meet his 1899 counterpart. Escorting her away from the park, they walk back to her apartment where he leaves her out in the street to purchase some flowers. However, despite Alexander having removed her from the danger of the robber, Emma is knocked down and trampled by a horse and carriage outside. The horses were spooked by the early motor car.
Alexander realizes bitterly that if he prevents one means of Emma's death, another will take its place. Disenchanted with the prospect, he decides to go forward in time to find out if there are any answers in the future.
[edit] The time travel
Alexander stops in 2030 and learns that the Moon is being prepared for colonization. He visits the New York Public Library where he talks with Vox 114, the library's holographic, artificially intelligent librarian. He is given information on H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and even one of his own papers, but the library does not have any information on time travel theory; Vox states that such a thing is impossible.
Frustrated, Alexander asks about the time machine itself and is given information on H.G. Wells' novel. Finding nothing of use, Alexander moves on to the future, until he hit a 'bump' seven years later in 2037, where he finds that the Moon mining operation has disrupted the lunar orbit. As a result, the Moon is breaking apart and showering Earth with massive chunks of rock. His presence outside of a shelter leads to an attempt by two military personnel to arrest him, but he escapes. He makes it into the machine just as the city is being destroyed, but is knocked unconscious and fails to witness the destruction of civilization. Alexander and his time machine speed through hundreds of millennia.
Regaining consciousness, Alexander brings the machine to a halt in 802,701 AD, and finds that civilization has devolved to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Calling themselves the Eloi, these survivors have built their homes into the side of a cliff on what resembles Manhattan. Alexander begins to develop a relationship with a woman named Mara, a teacher, and one of few who recall some of the Time Traveler's now obsolete language. He also realizes the Moon is now broken in half.
As Alexander is introduced to Eloi society, he is shown a collection of stone fragments and signs from what was once New York, including a sign from Tiffany and Co, the Empire State Building and a section of tiled panels from Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall Subway Station.
While Alex is inspecting the machine after seeing an Eloi memorial for their parents, Mara tells him to go back to his own time and take her younger brother Kalen with him. Suddenly, the Eloi are attacked by Morlocks, monstrous, pale, ape-like creatures that hunt the Eloi for food. The Morlocks capture Mara and carry her off. Trying to find out where she has been taken, Alexander is told that "the Ghost" might know. As it turns out, the Eloi are speaking about Vox 114, the holographic librarian that Alexander had talked to before the destruction of the Moon, who is still functioning after all these years.
With Vox 114's help, Alexander finds a way into the underground realm of the Morlocks, but is captured and taken to an underground chamber where Mara is kept in a cage, and where the Morlocks' leader, the Über-Morlock (played by Jeremy Irons), is waiting. The Über-Morlock reveals that they have a caste-like society, with each caste (nearly a different species in itself) fulfilling a different role in Morlock society. The ruling caste of this society are super-intelligent telepaths, while the hunters that Alex has encountered so far were bred to be predators. Attempting to explain his actions, the Über-Morlock reasons that he and his people are not evil. He asks "Who are you to question eight hundred thousand years... of evolution?" He also indicates that there are other clans similar to his.
The Über-Morlock then reveals the reason why Alexander cannot alter Emma's fate: he is caught in a temporal paradox. Since Emma's death was the prime factor that drove him to build the time machine, he cannot use the machine without her death being incorporated into the timeline, as otherwise he would have had no reason to build the machine in the first place. The Über-Morlock also states that the Morlocks would not exist without Alexander, but doesn't explain why.
Alexander learns that the Morlocks were people who chose to stay underground after the Moon collapsed and the Eloi were those who chose to brave the fallout. His time machine has been found by the Morlocks and taken underground. To escape, Alexander jumps into the machine and sends it hurtling forward in time, taking the Über-Morlock with him. The two of them fight until Alexander pushes him outside of the time sphere. He watches as the Über-Morlock ages and dies outside of the time bubble.
Alexander slows the machine as the sky appears overhead. He has traveled to the year 635,427,810 AD, and the landscape is now a desolate wasteland, completely dominated by the Morlocks.
Finally accepting that he can never save Emma, Alexander travels back in time to rescue the trapped Mara. After setting her free and before escaping, he sets the time machine to travel to the future and uses his pocket watch to jam the controls, causing it to malfunction and explode, creating a time distortion stream. Alexander and Mara escape just as the explosion kills off the Morlocks.
Trapped in the future, Alexander resolves to build a new life for himself with Mara. He begins to rebuild civilization, Vox telling the Eloi the stories in his memory. This closing scene is shown side by side with a sequence in the year 1903, where David Philby chats with Alexander's elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Watchit, before leaving and throwing away his bowler hat on the street.
[edit] Cast
(in order of appearance)
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[edit] Deleted scenes
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This section does not cite any references or sources. (October 2007) Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
- A scene was removed from the opening of the film, showing a practical experiment by Alexander Hartdegen explaining thermals; the scene led to a brief conversation between Hartdegen and the Dean of Columbia University. Evidence of the removed scene can be seen in cast members looking directly at the camera (originally intended to represent the point of view of the Dean) and a collection of coats left in Hartdegen's classroom.
- A scene that was scripted, but abandoned as it was considered inappropriate in light of the then recent events of September 11th 2001, was to have shown sections of the shattered moon crashing into the futuristic skyscrapers of 2037 New York City.
- The scenes of college life and of Hartdegen as a professor, which were cut from the film, were shot at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.
[edit] Alternate sequences
A selection of scenes and sequences are shown in the trailers to have notable differences from those seen in the final film. These include:
- An alternate cloud pattern and fewer futuristic skyscrapers in the establishing pan sequence of the 2030 New York Public Library.
- Alternate identification and menu graphics appear on the transparent display screens of the Vox hologram system within the library.
- A possible 'alternate future' depicts Hartdegen and the time machine, standing on a hillside before a futuristic settlement, set within the changed landscape of what was once New York.
[edit] Production
[edit] Special effects
The Morlocks (in the story, semi-human creatures which live in the future), were created using actors in costumes wearing animatronic masks. For scenes in which they would have needed to run on all fours faster than would be humanly possible, ILM created Computer-generated versions of the creatures.[1]
Many of the time traveling scenes were entirely computer generated, including a 33-second shot which begins in the workshop where the time machine is located. The camera pulls out, traveling through a city and then into space and past the moon to reveal earth’s lunar colonies. Plants and buildings are shown springing up and then being replaced by new growth in a constant cycle. In later shots, the effects team used an erosion algorithm to digitally simulate the earth’s landscape changing through the centuries.[2]
For some of the lighting effects used for the digital time bubble around the time machine, ILM developed an extended-range color format, which they named rgbe (red, green blue, and an exponent channel) (See Paul E. Debevec and Jitendra Malik, “Recovering High Dynamic Range Radiance Maps from Photographs, Siggraph Proceedings, 1997).[3]
[edit] Critical reception
The film received a 28% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 144 critic reviews[4]. Many critics preferred the earlier film and the original novel, implying that the story lacked the heart of its previous conceptions. William Arnold of the Seattle Post-intelligencer, who was somewhat positive about the film, writes that it lacks some of the simplicity and charm of the 1960’s George Pal film by adding characters such as Jeremy Iron’s “uber-morlock”. However, he praised actor Guy Pearce’s “more eccentric” time traveler and his transition from an awkward intellectual to a man of action. [5] Victoria Alexander of Filmsinreview.com wrote that “The Time Machine is a loopy love story with good special effects but a storyline that's logically incomprehensible,” [6] noting some “plot holes” having to deal with Hartdegan and his machine’s cause-and-effect relationship with the outcome of the future. Other critics claimed that the film had (or had the potential for) an interesting, valuable social commentary, and preferred the revised version of the story presented in the new film. In a slightly more negative light, Jay Carr of the Boston Globe writes: “The truth is that Wells wasn't that penetrating a writer when it came to probing character or the human heart. His speculations and gimmicks were what propelled his books. The film, given the chance to deepen its source, instead falls back on its gadgets”. Another view is that the film makes the mistake of Americanizing Dr. Hartdegan, and that the film is another example of Hollywood taking ideas from the British rather than coming up with original content. Contrary to Wells' novel, the beginning of the film takes place in the United States rather than Great Britain.
Some critics praised the special effects, declaring the film visually impressive and colorful, while others thought the effects were poor. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times found the Morlock animation cartoonish and unrealistic (due to their manner of leaping and running).[7] However, Ebert notes the contrast in terms of the social/racial representation of the attractive Eloi between the two films… between the “dusky sun people” of this version and the blonde, blue-eyed race in the George Pal film. Aside from its futuristic visions, the film’s recreation of Victorian London won it some praise..[citation needed] Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle writes “The far future may be awesome to consider, but from period detail to matters of the heart, this film is most transporting when it stays put in the past.”
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Barbara Robertson, About Time: Digital Domain and ILM developed new technologies to create effects for the movie The Time Machine, Computer Graphics World, March 2002, Volume 25 Number 3, pages 24-25
- ^ Barbara Robertson, About Time: Digital Domain and ILM developed new technologies to create effects for the movie The Time Machine, Computer Graphics World, March 2002, Volume 25 Number 3, pages 24-25
- ^ Barbara Robertson, About Time: Digital Domain and ILM developed new technologies to create effects for the movie The Time Machine, Computer Graphics World, March 2002, Volume 25 Number 3, pages 24-25
- ^ http://www.rottentomatoes.com,"[1]"
- ^ Seattleepi.nwsource.com, "[2]"
- ^ http://www.rottentomatoes.com,"[3]"
- ^ http://Rogerebert.suntimes..com,"[4]"
[edit] External links
- The Time Machine at the Internet Movie Database
- The Time Machine at Rotten Tomatoes
- The Time Machine at Box Office Mojo
- Cinematographic analysis of "Time Machine"
