ReWatch: The Time Machine

2002, Simon Wells (Balto) -- Netflix

The problem with having a movie blog that is over almost 15 years old is that I am not always sure I have already written about an older movie. This is most undoubtedly a "rewatch" as I know I saw it before but I do recall it being so bad, I never felt the need to rewatch, but I wondered if I had already succumbed to curiosity, like I did this time. Yes, my memory is that fallible these days.

I might need a tag "wait was it really that bad ?" 

This was a terrible movie. It is still a terrible movie. It is Hollywood spectacle for the sake of spectacle and doesn't even try to make a lick of sense. Part of my brain went down the silly path of "they weren't very smart back then" postulating that the Purple Suit brain was even less formed back in the early 2000s than it is now. Its like looking at a medieval painting and marveling at how unsophisticated they were in manners of artistic ability. But no, there have always been silly, terrible, badly made movies, with budgets, and there always will be. Besides, despite what my 20sumthin coworkers say, "the early 2000s" was not that long ago.

Its 1899 and Dr. Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce, The Rover) is a college professor in New York City... so, four years after HG Wells published his novel on time travel. As with all Funny Professors, Hartdegen is socially awkward and would rather work on weird gadgets and scientific theories than interact with people, who have boiled down to his house main, his friend & fellow teacher David Philby (Mark Addy, Game of Thrones) and his latest fiancée Emma (Sienna Guillory, Meg 2: The Trench), a woman who finds his weirdness and forgetfulness charming. He intends on marrying her but on the night he proposes to her, she is killed by a Central Park mugger. 

Dr Alex becomes obsessed with Changing the Past. He isolates himself from everyone and works on one of the prettiest renditions of The Time Machine in cinematic history -- a big steampunk thing of brass tubes and shaped glass. But Time Travel doesn't help, as no matter how much he alters events so she isn't killed by the mugger, she is killed somewhere else by something else. The past is rigid. So, he decides to go into The Future to see if they have figured out why you cannot change the past.

He makes a brief pitstop in 2030, where he talks to an AI Librarian (learning about the HG Wells novel, nudge nudge wink wink; Orlando Jones, The Good Lord Bird) and then pops over to 2037 they have Blown Up the Moon (!!!). Then he bumps his head and ends up in 802,701. In this Far Future, everyone is brown and primitive. I cannot decide if this is just being faithful to the novel or low-key racist or scientifically likely. Anywayz, when, almost a million years ago, they Blew Up the Moon it pretty much ended civilization as we know it. Except for AI Librarians who not only have really good batteries but also storage & display media built to last a million years -- yeah, uh huh.

Anywayz, the lovely primitive cliff dwellers, Eloi, are being attacked and taken on regular cycles by the cave-mannish Morlocks. Despite being obsessed with saving Emma, only months before, Alex sees pretty primitive Mara in her revealing skirt and friendly ways and.... googley eyes! He's also suddenly less socially awkward, which is made even weirder by the fact he has been pulled out of Victorian times into a birds next hanging off the side of a cliff. Then, one day, on a visit to the Eloi wind vanes that don't serve any real purpose, the Morlocks attack, jumping out of the sand, grabbing Eloi and jumping back into the sand. This effect makes no sense. As said, not much of the movie doesn't. But its exciting and I guess follows a Rule of Cool ?

Do they burrow? Are there looser sand pockets? Do they have psionic mole abilities to push sand out of their way? Why does it fill back in after they jump in/out?

Anywayz, underground Alex discovers two things: the Morlocks eat Eloi and there are Über-Morlocks, evil white-skinned, intelligent and telepathic Morlocks that still look human... somewhat. They control the other Morlocks and keep them from eating every last Eloi, which would deplete the food supply.  I guess there are no other animals worth eating? Anywayz, Mr Über-Morlock (Jeremy Irons, Dungeons & Dragons), who is the best cinematic depiction of Elric of Melnibone I have seen (Google it) explains to Alex that the reason he cannot change the past is because The Time Machine was invented because of Emma's death, so it cannot bring him to a place where he could undo itself. Timey Wimey Grandfather Paradox shit. 

Then Alex and Mr. Über-Morlock fight it out, send The Time Machine into an even FURTHER future where Alex sees the Morlocks ruling over a (even more) broken Earth. He kills Mr. Über-Morlock and then goes back to Mara (note: only saving her, all other Eloi are Morlock Snacks) and decides to live Happily Ever After in the The Future. He blows up The Time Machine.

Huh? There are still hungry Morlocks, even if Exploding Time Machine energy wiped a good amount of them away. And there are other Über-Morlocks, just not in this region. I guess this was lame franchise attempts? 

I am sure there is a "How Did This Get Made?" episode of a podcast or treatise on the production of this movie somewhere on YouTube or in a (gasp!) print magazine. No matter how far we come, as Hollywood evolves we will always have incredibly terrible Hollywood Spectacles that are made the way they are for one reason or another. And I will probably end up watching them, and probably more than once. THAT is the bigger question.