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The Time Machine (2002 film)
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The Time Machine is a 2002 science fiction film adapted from the 1895 novel of the same name by H. G. Wells, and the 1960 film screenplay by David Duncan. 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 the 1960 film adaptation.
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.
ander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) is a shy, dedicated scientist living in 1899 New York City.
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The Time Machine is a 2002 science fiction film adapted from the 1895 novel of the same name by H. G. Wells, and the 1960 film screenplay by David Duncan. 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 the 1960 film adaptation.
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.
Plot
Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) is a shy, dedicated 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. One day, on his way to the park to meet his girlfriend Emma, he becomes distracted by a motor car beside the park gates. He puts himself in immediate good graces with the driver who, while refueling, forgot to activate the parking brake – something Alexander does quickly when it threatens to get out of control. While walking in the park with Emma (Sienna Guillory), Alex proposes to her. The romantic moment is short-lived; a robber emerges from nearby bushes and holds a gun on them. Alexander gives him all the money he has, but the robber also wants Emma's ring; both Alexander and Emma refuse to give it up. During the struggle that follows, the gun goes off and Emma is fatally wounded, dying in Alexander's arms.
For the next four years, Alexander spends every waking hour working on his time travel calculations, and eventually succeeds in building a working time machine. His self-imposed exile has led to him being ostracized from his oldest friend David Philby, who 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 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".
When the time machine gets completed on February 3, 1903 he travels back to January 18, 1899 and intercepts Emma before she was destined to meet his 1899 counterpart. Escorting her away from the park where they would meet the robber, they walk back to her apartment where he leaves her out in the street to buy her 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 horse was scared by the motor car which Alexander helped to stop before. 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.
Alexander stops on May 24, 2030 and learns that the Moon is being prepared for colonization. He visits the New York Public Library where he talks with Vox 114, a holographic AI librarian. Vox has information on H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and even one of his own papers, but not on time travel, stating that such a thing is impossible.
Alexander moves on to the future, until he hits a 'bump' on August 26, 2037. The Moon mining operation has disrupted the lunar orbit, causing the satellite to break apart and showering Earth with massive chunks of rock. Two soldiers want to take Alexander to the shelter but he escapes. Alexander makes it into the time machine just as the city is destroyed, but is knocked unconscious. Alexander and his time machine speed through hundreds of millennia.
Regaining consciousness, Alexander brings the machine to a halt on July 16, 802,701 AD, and finds that civilization has devolved to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The survivors, calling themselves the Eloi, have built their homes into the side of a cliff on what resembles Manhattan. Alexander is nursed back to health by a woman named Mara (Samantha Mumba) and begins to develop a relationship with her—a teacher, and one of few who knows the Time Traveler's now obsolete language, through an Eloi ritual passed down through the ages—and her younger brother Kalen (Omero Mumba). During the night Alexander has a nightmare and realizes that all Eloi had the same nightmare at the same time.
One day, a stunned Alexander finds himself running when the Eloi are attacked and Mara and others are captured, disappearing instantly through the sandy ground with the Morlocks—monstrous, pale, ape-like creatures that hunt the Eloi for food. Trying to find out where she has been taken, Alexander is told that "the Ghost" might know. "The Ghost" is Vox 114, the holographic librarian, who is still functioning after all these millenia. Vox explains that there are now two different races of people.
Alexander promises Kalen that he will find his sister. With Vox 114's help, Alexander locates a way into the underground realm of the Morlocks, but is captured. The Morlocks' leader, the astonishingly more human-looking Über-Morlock, explains that they were people who chose to stay underground after the Moon collapsed, while the Eloi were those who chose to remain on the surface. The Morlock have evolved into a caste-like society, with each caste fulfilling a different role. The ruling caste are super-intelligent telepaths, while the hunters that Alex has encountered were bred to be predators.
The Über-Morlock reveals the reason why Alexander cannot alter Emma's fate. 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 he would have had no reason to build the machine in the first place. The Über-Morlock (Jeremy Irons) also states that the Morlocks would not exist without those like Alexander in their quest for science and technology.
The Morlocks have found Alexander's time machine and have brought it underground. With the Uber-Morlock about to send Alexander back, he hands Alexander his pocket watch. Suddenly, Alexander pulls him into the machine's sphere with him, pushing the control lever far forward, taking himself & the Über-Morlock into the far future. The two fight until Alexander pushes him outside of the time sphere, and stares as the Über-Morlock hyper-ages, disintegrating outside the time bubble. Exhausted, Alexander slows the machine as the sky appears overhead, revealing a harsh, red-oxide color. He is now in the year 635,427,810 AD, and the landscape is a desolate wasteland as far as the eye can see, dotted with immense, sinister, Morlock surface entrances. In the distance, Alexander sees a human-like procession walking slowly.
Finally accepting that he can never save Emma, Alexander travels back in time to rescue Mara. After freeing her, he sets the time machine to forward, but jamming the controls with his watch, causing it to malfunction and create a time distortion stream. Alexander, Mara, Kalen and their tribe escape to the surface as the time stream disintegrates the Morlocks.
Given a new purpose and future, Alexander resolves to build a new life for himself, Mara and the Eloi, with the help of Vox and his vast record of history. The 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 as a small tribute to a conversation they had had before the accident, wherein Alexander had wanted his students to be free thinkers and to "knock off every bowler they saw."
Cast
(in order of appearance)
Noted on the DVD
Scenes Deleted
- 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. This led to a 3 month delay of the film's theatrical release.
- 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.
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 sunny hillside before a small futuristic settlement, set by a lake with sail-vehicles, within the changed leafy landscape of what was once New York.
Production
Special effects
The Morlocks (in the story, semi-humanoid creatures that dwell in the future) were depicted using actors in costumes wearing animatronic masks. For scenes in which they run on all fours faster than humanly possible, Industrial Light and Magic created CGI versions of the creatures.
Many of the time traveling scenes were entirely computer generated, including a 33-second shot 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.
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).
Soundtrack
The theme music from the soundtrack was used in the 2008 Discovery Channel Mini series "When We Left Earth". The original music was scored by Klaus Badelt.
Critical reception
The film received a 28% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 144 critic reviews. 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 George Pál 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. 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," 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. 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 vision of the future, the film's recreation of New York at the turn of the century won it some praise. 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."
See also
External links
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