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Seemingly
running at less than an hour, the newest version of the H.G. Wells
time travel adventure "The Time Machine" is too short
to get annoying. It's a fair adventure with some all-right effects
and at least the beginnings of a compelling story that it abandons
half-way through.
Improving
very little on George Pal's 1960 version, Simon Well's "Time
Machine" has not much to recommend it, even by changing the
protagonist and creating more motivation for the hero. In the 1960
version (I've never read the story), the time travelling explorer
is motivated by nothing more than the spirit of scientific enquiry
to use his own invention to travel into the future. In the new production,
the scientist (not Wells, but an American professor played by Guy
Pearce) creates a time machine at first to go back in time
in order to undo the events that lead to the death of his beloved
girlfriend.
Without
explaining the whys or hows, the professor discovers that he cannot
prevent her death, even by changing the chain of events that originally
lead up to it. Daunted, he decides to fast forward to the future
where he believes future science will uncover the reasons why he
can't change the past.
Instead,
he finds Orlando Jones.
That
was cheap. There's nothing wrong with the 7-UP guy appearing in
the movie. In fact his role in the movie as a holographic librarian
is one of the more honest attempts to keep the movie on theme. Still,
the problem with "The Time Machine" is that the farther
it goes into the future, the more the script seems to abandon any
attempt to answer the questions raised in the first part in favour
of giant jumping sub-humans, naked people and special effects.
I'm
in favour of all three but the makers of "The Time Machine"
needed to make a decision early on to dispense with cornball drama
and embrace the silliness of the sci-fi concepts thrown at
the audience in the latter half of the film. Some of these concepts
are in the original versions but a lot are not. The exploding moon
colony that disrupts the Earth's orbit is right out of Thundarr
the Barbarian. The 'localized time explosion' that wipes out
the bad guys seems to follow the cliche that sophisticated machines
will blow up good by jamming them in the middle of a process. Other
cliches include the hero directing a jet of steam at the villain
in a crucial moment and the-girl-with-the-shovel
who-saves-the-day™.
Nothing
is really bad-bad in "The Time Machine", nor is it good.
One couldn't call Jeremy Iron's scenery-chewing performance as the
"Uber-Morlock" (that's what he's really called) really
bad when compared to Guy Pearce's really mannered, absent-minded
professor performance in the beginning. And then you have Samantha
Mumba as a nice nearly-naked body to stare at in a future Ewok-esque
paradise. None of this is really unexpected. They all just fit the
type of candy-floss movie "The Time Machine" is. By the
time you might be checking your watch, the movie finishes with a
chase, explosion and the guy gets the girl. No harm done.
In
theatres now.
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