ookish, absent-minded Professor Alexander Hartdegen (Pearce) cares about only one thing more than his machines and scientific theories: Emma (Sienna Guillory), his beautiful fiancée. In turn-of-the-20th-century New York, Hartdegen is so engrossed in his calculations that he nearly forgets that he has a date with Emma in Central Park—an important one, as he intends to propose.
After presenting Emma with a moonstone ring, Alexander is surprised when a man steps out of the bushes and makes a proposition of his own: give him their money and jewelry and no one will be hurt. But Emma refuses to surrender the ring, with tragic consequences.
Four years later, a gaunt, disheveled Alexander has isolated himself from his close friend Philby (Mark Addy) and maternal housekeeper, Mrs. Watchit (Phyllida Law), and buried himself in a mysterious project. Hartdegen has built himself a machine to travel in time.
First stop: the fateful night in Central Park. Alexander is overcome with emotion at seeing his long-dead love once again and quickly rushes her out of the park. Satisfied that he has changed history, he leaves her for a moment—only to discover, too late, that the past will not alter so easily.
Back in his lab, Alexander drives the time machine forward to find out why. The sun strobes across the sky and the city of New York transforms around him in the blink of an eye as he arrives in the year 2030. In the New York Public Library of the future, Alexander puts his question to Vox (Jones), a holographic "compendium of all human knowledge": Why can't I change the past?
Vox has no answer. Alexander pushes forward a half-dozen years—to a moment when Earth's history is disastrously transformed. Barely escaping, Alexander powers up the time machine before falling unconscious. The centuries pass like seconds, the landscape transforms geologically. By the time Alexander awakes, he has arrived in the year 802,701. A race of beautiful, cliff-dwelling humans, the Eloi, tend to his injuries. But there is something sinister about this brave, new world—and it is more frightening than anything from Alexander's past.
Tragic tampering with the first time-traveler
The Time Machine is the granddaddy (or, in director Wells' case, the great-granddaddy) of all time-travel stories and arrives in theaters in a new incarnation that pays homage not only to H.G. Wells' original book, but also to the much-loved, if cheesy, 1960 movie from director George Pal.
This souped-up new Machine has much to recommend it, including awe-inspiring sequences of time travel (courtesy of Digital Domain), canny production design (by Oliver Scholl), affectionate nods to Pal (including a cameo by the original Philby, Alan Young), occasionally thrilling action and a few warmly amusing character moments, particularly between Alexander and the snarky and hilarious Vox. The new time machine itself is a marvel of design and construction, at once steampunk-retro and state-of-the-art whizbang.
But The Time Machine's different parts don't fit together nearly as well as the time machine itself. Director Wells and screenwriter Logan (Gladiator) have reconceived key story points and added the death of Alexander's fiancée as the film's motivating force. But the changes complicate the narrative to the point that the film's segments fail to mesh, like gears grinding out of phase. The movie also feels like it's running on only three cylinders, as if important character and story moments were edited out in favor of the action and visual-effects sequences.
Most problematic are the abrupt transitions in Alexander's character arc, though the accomplished Pearce tries to keep up. Alexander changes too quickly from a shy bookworm to a haunted obsessive to a heroic action figure, and Alexander's quest to save his fiancée has little or nothing to do with his subsequent adventures with the Eloi.
Wells and Logan also reinvent H.G. Wells' original Eloi-Morlock mythology and create a new supervillain (played by Jeremy Irons), diluting the original story's effectiveness as a metaphor for class struggle or the conflict between the id and the superego or any of several other interpretations. This Time Machine has it too many ways: some Morlocks are brutes, others are enlightened; the Eloi are spoiled and passive, but also altruistic and heroic.
Irish pop star Mumba is the film's female lead, renamed Mara, but she has too little to do, though she has the proper look of the presumed multiracial human of the future.
