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The Time Machine

The Time Machine

List Price: $14.99
Your Price: $13.49
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: NOTHING to do with Wells' work!
Review: Once again a big FX budget makes dishwater of an excellent story. Although the 1960 version was romanced up and the ending made more blithe than the original book, it was --at heart--more true to Wells' work. Wells' story, however, is brilliant. From the UN-NAMED main characters to the horrific image at the story's close, the tale is a gripper. WHY OH WHY can't any director simply take a good story and let it tell itself? This version is laughable, pot-boiler, silly at times, and so full of over FX and over made up villains (who do NOT exist in a person in the orig.) that I nearly puked. I walked out on this film in the theatre.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Competant re-make
Review: I can't understand why the critics gave this one so much trouble. I've seen the orignal a few times and found this to be an enjoyable remake. In some area, I actually preferred this version, as it held more of an emotional impact to me.

If you've seen the original or are simply interested with the concept of time-travel, it's best to go into this movie thinking of it as an original story in itself. You'll enjoy yourself more.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: #1
Review: I'm not a huge fan of Science Fiction but , this was great .

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: DVD AWESOME!!! Movie pretty good for a re-make
Review: I brought thi DVD Yesturday and I watched it twice in the same night just to get everything stright!,,
The DVD is supreb!
Creating the moorlocks and time machine are good and informitive
Deleted scene- its 1 scence but its about 5 min to!...

... Alough the movie dissapointingly does not leave a door open for a sequal but it i very advaced in technoigy.
It is my opion that this is something you can own!.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: How could they have messed this up!?!
Review: How could they have [messed] this up? They had the book to follow. What's worse is that it was received so poorly that we'll have wait another forty-two years, at least, before someone else attempts a remake. Yes, it is a movie about a guy who builds a time machine and travels into the future from the late 19th century, there are creatures called Morlocks and the time machine was made out of brass parts, beyond that, this film bears about as much semblance to the original as a tea leaf does to the entire East India Company, (Thank you, Douglas Adams).

If there were no book entitled 'The Time Machine' by H.G. Wells, I might have given it three stars, but because it plays so fast and loose with its logic and pacing that another rewrite or three might have been in order. Plus for a guy capable of building a device that can move through time with 19th century technology, he has about as much of a grasp of temporal causality as a concussed bee, (Again, thank you Mr. Adams). This fine English...er, American gentleman Alexander (Guy Pierce), an associate professor at Columbia university does all of this because his lady love Emma is meant to die. First she gets shot by a mugger, so he goes back in time to move her away from that event to a New York street corner away from the park. Where she promptly gets run over by a runaway horse and carriage. If that doesn't convince one that something is not meant to be, then nothing will. Bright boy then decides that since going back in time doesn't seem to solve anything, going into the future might.

Right.

The only problem is, that's already one-third of the movie. He travels ahead to 2032 where mankind has moved into space and are building vacation spots on the moon. Unfortunately, mankind is as capable of excavating land on the moon as our hero is at understand temporal causality. Mankind blows up the moon- cracks it right in half and gravity being what it is sends a lot of it crashing into the planet. Does our hero Alexander go back in time to try and prevent this? No. Why? Probably because he's realized that he can't, so after a bump on a noggin that renders him insensate...more so, he's slung 802,701 years into the future. Yes, the special effects of the passage of time are nothing short of brilliant and the epochal time lapse is stunning, too bad it's in this dung heap of a film.

He awakens under the care of an Eloi woman, Mara (Samantha Mumba) who is of course exotic and beautiful, which also means that she's doomed. As another reviewer correctly pointed out, for some reason they speak English 800,000 years from now. No reason for this, they do it to remember the past times. Just why they do it is never explained. The cliff dwelling Eloi are nothing but prey animals for the Morlocks, who we learn cannot stand daylight. We learn this only after we see them hunting by day. Next we meet big bad brain boy king daddy Morlock, played by Jeremy Irons, who is of course a telepathic/telekinetic god and has nefarious plans for our sumptuous Eloi lady. He has also learned where the time machine is, had it brought to his underground estate, and plans to use it. Of course if he was as smart as he appeared to be, he would know that going into the past is pointless and he could only effectively carry forward into the future.

As much of a cinematic stinkburger as this film is, it does have its good points, few that they are. The Vox (Orlando Jones), the holographic computer that Alexander meets in 2037 at the New York Public Library is wonderful, especially when met 800,000 years in the future. He is sad, almost insane, contrasting the Eloi who have no knowledge of the past and no ambition of the future. The Vox remembers everything. The imagery is quite stunning, especially the beautiful cliff-side dwellings of the Eloi and have a wonderful organic look to them. Guy Pierce as Alexander is also quite likeable- he is heroic, compassionate and decent. Plus the Fellowship of the Rings Orc-like underground lair of the Morlocks is fantastic, as are the Morlocks themselves, despite the rather illogical premise of their existence, that of not being able to tolerate the light, yet hunting by day.

So ten out of ten for purely visual quality, but the story is so lacking that it all but wrecks the rest of the film. The pacing is all wrong- the end meeting with the villain takes place in a single chamber within the Morlock lair- no drawn out conflict between the Eloi. Heck, I would have even approved of Alexander had organized the Eloi to fight back against them, but his meeting with the Uber-Morlock was just too short. Even in its current form, if they had explained things a little better, making it a half hour longer or just outright removed Alexander's reason for going into the future anyway- Emma's death and did it 'just because' without the cathartic transformation would have been just fine.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Interesting idea ... lousy ending
Review: Entertaining and fresh time-travel idea but the ending is abrupt and a bit disappointing. It's almost as if they ran out of money and tried to wrap it all up as fast as they could. It's about a scientist who discovered the secret of time travelling after a tragedy, and it involves both moving back in time and forward. You get a glimps of the past, the future, and the future beyond that.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: OVERALL GOOD MOVIE
Review: It makes one to think how the humanity is going on.It put its effect on my mind.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not much logic
Review: This movie left me with MANY questions. First of all, if the moon accident is what caused all these terrible things why wouldn't the guy go back and save the moon instead of fighting super strong monsters? Second, the movie starts out in a time when the first car has been invented. They don't even have TVs. Yet this guy can make a time machine??? It would have made more sense to put him in a more present time. Third, why does he stop in a time period with monsters?????? He goes into the future and they have all these neat things. Glass panels with a guy living in them who knows all the information in the world! Why would he leave that? He goes further into the future and gets to a time where there's monsters who eat people everywhere and says "hmmm...I think I'll stay here." What a moron! ANYWAY...I loved this movie despite all the frustrations. The special effects are wonderful. I loved the white leader of the monsters. He was the best part of the movie. It also made me wonder why the guy attacked him even when he was letting him go back in time. If an extremely powerful monster who eats people wants to let me go I'm gonna get ... out of there. Not stick around to fight him. Oh well. I guess you're not supposed to think about these things in a movie like this.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Dumb Kulcha
Review: Hollywood has often been afflicted with a disease. Call it "Dumb-it-down Syndrome" if you like. But this latest exploding pustule is one of its rankest and most vile manifestations.

There is not a single braincell of the book left in tact, despite the book being popular enough to be in print for over a century. Moronic in extremis, this latest adaptation leaves little scope for the target audience (teen boys) to go on to reading the actual book (and then on to other books), as they would recognise almost nothing (unlike the Pal film).

Anyone who thinks that a faithful adaptation would not have found an audience needn't go any further than the one-man stage adaptation of the book, recently staged twice in my local area. A mesmerizing hour, with a chair as the only prop!

Ironically, the "South Park" adaptation of Great Expectations - complete with Miss Havesham's army of robot monkeys - is a vastly more faithful adaptation of a book than Simon Wells' The Time Machine. It's painful to read in the introduction of the latest reprint of the novel how Simon Wells, as H.G. Wells' great-grandson, always wanted to make a movie of the book. My question is, why didn't he?

Get the George Pal DVD instead. Forget last year's remake. Just forget it.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Shallow and simplistic.
Review: As another reviwer has stated on this forum, if the producers of this movie wanted to make their own film about time travel,they were free to do so. But this movie is very, very loosely based on the H.G.Wells classic.

Now, we serious science fiction buffs are relatively intelligent creatures. We understand that the books spoke not just about amazing technical breakthroughs, but also that it was and still is a warning and a well-written social commentary. This is the part that Hollywood conveniently left out.The movie became a show of special effects and little more.

Some details are also rather questionable. Does anyone REALLY believe that 800,000 years from now anyone will still be speaking English? Anyone spoken Sumerian lately?.... those people lived just under 4,000 years ago...

The Uber-Morlock volunteers a concise course on the history of the post-cataclysm world to Guy Pearce (in perfect English, of course...) and tells him that when the subterreanan survivors tried to emerge from the darkness they could not...yet somehow the Morlocks hunt in daylight. Incosistent even for this simple movie. Other little things abound...

In general, though special effects are good,I was rather disappointed with this movie, and would not recommend it to anyone who has actually read the book.


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