Rating: 
Summary: Give it a second chance.
Review: When I first saw this movie I was totally disappointed. Being a George Pal 1960s classic fan I just could not relate to this movie and I thought that there were too many obscure and not believable events and contradictions in the new 2002 film. I recently bought the dvd of this movie and watched it carefully, listening to the dialogue and also to the commentaries. I understand the movie better now and it does make more sense, however it still suffers from major contradictions and holes. I really want to like this movie but I am stretching my judgement already. The deleted scene would have helped somewhat but it was cut out. Overall: Poor to Fair (Good if you have a six pack before watching this). The DVD picture and sound quality are very good.
Rating: 
Summary: Technical progression; narrative regression.
Review: Because this movie is directed by Simon Wells, great-grandson of H.G., one would expect a lovingly familial concern with sticking as close to the source material as cinematic restraints would allow. Nah. *The Time Machine* is strictly a market calculation, the target of which is the pre-teen set. Early on, it's not altogether bad. In fact, it verges on the quite good. A new motivation is given to our time-traveling hero: his fiancee is accidentally killed in a hold-up; obsessed with "turning back time", the hero invents his machine in order to return to the past and save her life. The illogic of this attempt is demonstrated to him, and so he sets off in the future, landing first in the year 2030. Though these scenes are brief, this near-future world is reasonably conceived, featuring continuous advertising for condominium-like living on the Moon. Another short bump through the future reveals the hubris of the Moon venture: it has been knocked out of orbit due to massive mining and detonating underneath the surface. We get a glimpse of the Moon horrifically large in the sky and breaking apart. Injured and disoriented, our hero makes it back to his machine and embarks on a *2001*-worthy voyage to the far-distant future. The rise and fall of deserts, ice-pack, vegetation, over and over, is pretty spectacular -- a rare case of CG attempting to realistically meet the narrative demands of a film. But once landed 800,000 years in the future, the drama falls apart at a steep rate. All ideas are abandoned in favor of derring-do. The hero, who is introduced to us as a brilliant but bumbling genius, immediately transmogrifies into an action hero once the Morlocks appear. In other words, the movie surrenders to studio executives' conception of "market demands". (Good CG work on the Morlocks, by the way. Very distinctive-looking creatures. All in all, the computer work in this movie has to be considered a splendid success.)
Rating:
Summary: A fun flick
Review: I really enjoyed watching this film. While it does not use mant of the "little" things that made the novel or original film enjoyable, I found that I could just sit back and enjoy it as a story. Great music, good effects, and some good acting performances; (Guy Pearce did a terrific job) This newest version of The Time Machine will probably dissapoint hard core Wells fans, and those who expect movies to more closely follow the book; but if you just want to spend a couple hours watching a fun story, this is a good one to pick.
Rating:
Summary: This Machine does not Produce Genuine Imagination
Review: I was hoping for something original from this movie. What is the point of merely rehashing Wells' "Time Machine?" I thought this movie would show some new perspective, some interesting nuance, a dimension of the future I have not even thought about. I was disappointed. While intellectually this movie is vacant, it has decent special effects and good, albeit short, acting by Jeremy Irons. Look, H.G. Wells was scandalized by two important world-historic events that took place in Victorian England: the widespread scientific acceptance of the theory of evolution and the transformation of society due to the Industrial Revolution. His original "Time Machine" is an imaginative and socially conscious fusion of these occurrences presented in the form of the written word. But why would the movie made in 2002, made as it was in a different historical era, divorced from the same historical circumstances, would want to agonize over Victorian fears? The fears of which the current generation as a whole has no inkling. What do 99 percent of the people living in America today know of the horrors of 19th century factories, miserable working class lifestyles, and the shock to the conscience of decent God-fear proper people triggered by the spread of the theory of evolution? There is a minor new twist in this film. I want to be completely fair, you see. The movie does not blame class division or industrialization per se for the catastrophe of the human race being divided into two: one effete and docile, another predatory and unconscionable. But greed and the desire for good life are blamed. Apparently some corporation was building a resort on the Moon, and the explosion conducted as a part of the construction process, broke the whole Moon into several pieces, changing the orbit of the Earth and its climate. Those greedy corporations with their constant hunt for profits! And what about the decadent people who fuel the demand for their services! Imagine, these lazy, conspicuous consumption folks--they want to vacation on the Moon! In the end, I did not care. The Morlocks could eat all the Eloi, if they wanted to. What's it to me? Near the end of this fiasco, Guy Pearce lectures Jeremy Irons about the "human cost" involved in the food chain arrangement on Earth. That is such a 20th century liberal phrase, that upon hearing it, I became even more conscious that this movie does not take its viewers 800,0000 years forward. It simply takes them back into the ideology of the Left. Hollywood don't preach. I love your movies, just do not lecture me.
Rating: 
Summary: Herbert Would've Been Proud
Review: I never read the book, I've never seen the movie before this. Even after watching the movie at the cinema, my friends kept on bringing up the top question "What if" with all sorts of variances; like "What if the Holocaste never happened", or "What if Pearl Harbor had been empty of December 4th", same as with 9/11. By all means, go for it.
Rating: 
Summary: Throwback to Old-Fashioned Adventures
Review: Though the George Pal version of "The Time Machine" is still the better interpretation of Wells' novel, this special-effects-heavy update merits a view for its sheer determination to be fun. Guy Pearce takes over the reins from Rod Taylor, and like his predecessor, maintains a stalwart sense of decency as a Victorian inventor out of time. The twist here is that the time traveler seeks not the utopian future presumed in the novel--and therefore unfortunately avoids many of the philosophical discussions about the nature of humankind in the former film--but to overturn a personal tragedy. The result is a Saturday-matinee-style adventure that is both colorful and high-spirited, to the degree that much of the cynicism of Wells' original concept goes unnoticed. (Many viewers will probably overlook the irony that it is the "civilized" time traveler who introduces genocide to the post-apocalyptic future). Add some truly beautiful Eloi, a brief but effective performance by Jeremy Irons, and a lush score (despite sounding a bit too much like Jerry Goldsmith's from "The Edge"), and the combination is calculated to satisfy. Watch it with the family.
Rating:
Summary: You'll love it most if you've never seen (or read) it before
Review: If you've seen the 1960's version of the "Time Machine" or even braved Welles's book (or caught "Time After Time in 1979) there's really not a lot that will surprise you. That's a shame, because there's actually a lot here to enjoy, but spoiled by a script that seems to content to stick to the basics of a story that most science-fiction fans already know (at least subconsciously) and plump the rest with action. In the new version, the "Time Traveler" is a "Turn of the Century" New York inventor named Hartdegen (Guy Pierce), an earnest scientist who tragically loses his fiancée during a robbery in Central Park. Unlike intellectuals find solace in learning from the past and re-shaping the future, Hartdegen (who trades letters with some way-out Swiss patent clerk named Einstein) is determined to reshape the past and keep his future nice and neat. Throwing himself into his work, Hartdegen conceives a time machine. (That's right - though a product of Victorian times, Hartdegen is a very contemporary hero, for him it's personal.) Revisiting the scene of tragedy, Hartdegen saves the day - only to see his fiancée die anyway. No matter how often Hartdegen changes the history, fates snaps back. Frustrated, Hartdegen jumps ahead in time, hoping that a future civilization (which of course must be an advanced and civilized society) will discover how you can change history. Mankind of the future, Hartdegen unfortunately learns, is less concerned with changing the future or the past as it is with turning the moon into a huge condo. For serious questions, the future turns to a chatty holographic computer named Vox (Orlando Jones). Vox can't really solve Hartdegen's problems, but that's not really the point. We're smart enough to know that Hartdegen will never find an answer - a race against time is always a losing proposition. Jumping farther into the future when a global cataclysm nearly wipes out humanity, Hartdegen finds himself in the deceptive tranquility described in the original book - one in which the human race is split in half between gentle Eloi who do and think nothing, and the vicious Morlocks who create and consume everything. Hartdegen has barely enough time to fall in love and consider abandoning his search when he learns of the Morlocks, and decides that he must save the Eloi. The story introduces one new novelty - a thinking "uber" Morlock played by Jeremy Irons (an inspired bit of casting - he has psychic powers and can throw you around by the throat, but it's his verbal delivery that's deadliest), and even finds a way to keep Vox around in an age in which his creators aren't even a memory. The story is actually full of cool details, but spends no time on them before tossing Hartdegen into a fight or onto his machine or gets some other CGI action going. The story takes a novel approach to explaining what wiped out "civilization" (it was supposed to be war - class war in Welles's book, and nuclear war in the first movie; here it's a horrible miscalculation we can probably blame on some mega-corporation), but wastes little time between setting humanity up for a fall and dropping the bomb. Vox is annoying, and even verges into being inhuman (he seems a bit too fascinated by the vicious order of the Morlocks and Eloi) but that's the point - he's not supposed to be human, and he's supposed to be more amused than repelled by cruelty because of how much cruelty comprises his card catalog. Unfortunately, the film humanizes him, as if it knows no middle-ground between naughty and nice. The film gets some good mileage out of Hartdegen's personal search for a way to change the past, and surprisingly sets up the uber morlock with the climactic job of convincing him that he's stuck with the cards dealt by fate. Unfortunately, by then, Hartdegen has at least probably put that problem on the back burner, and it hasn't exactly obsessed us either. The uber Morlock becomes a mechanism for discovering Hartdegen's demon's, not by analyzing his machine, but simply reading his mind. It's not clear how his mental powers really can deal with Hartdegen's problems - but it's soon clear that the script has the same problem - the confrontation turns into a fight. In the end, this ed. of "The Time Machine" uses CGI effects to trail off where its smarter ideas should have been, leaving you little more than a slightly more inventive version of the original. If you've never seen (or read) it, you'll probably have the most fun.
Rating:
Summary: Not worth your time
Review: Boy, this left me hanging. I kept homeing something better would happen, something to build on what going to be pretty interesting if it kept up. Jeremy Irons was very good, I liked him, but expected more. It seemed like everyone was playing bit parts. I have yet to read the book, but expect it is better than this. Also, the way they made part of it sound, it was some terrible secret waiting to be explored, but I never figured it out. What were they babbleing about? The world may never know, because i don't think the director does.
Rating:
Summary: Slow plot but decent effects
Review: The possibility of time travel has always fascinated me, yet I was pretty bored for a good portion of the movie. There wasn't much character development, and the plot lacked substance. I was not "on the edge of my seat," even when there was some action and danger. I found myself analyzing how (un)realistic some of the special effects were ("wow that time lapse is way off"), and how they were done. This is a sign of a fairly boring movie. Still, the special effects were decent, and there was somewhat of a story line you could follow if the movie held your interest long enough.
Rating:
Summary: Good Old Saturday Afternoon Adventure
Review: One does not expect Hollywood to faithfully adapt a classic of literature to the screen. If you want a literary classic read it! This new adaption of THE TIME MACHINE shifts the plots locale from England to America and gives us a good adventure and love story with the odd and end item to ponder. Guy Pearce is quite good as the befuddled scientist. His scene where he ponders on who to blame for his beloved's death is both eerie and tender. The other surprise is Jeremy Irons as the Morlock king. I don't think I have ever seen him so heavily made up and it took a few moments to realize it was him. The effects are quite good and the story moves along never outstaying its welcome. When I was a kid the trip to the movies on Saturday was a part of the week and it was usually for what I would call the Saturday Afternoon Adventure Movie. Maybe not the greatest films (although there were a few of those) but some bit of escapism for a Saturday afternoon. On that level this new version of THE TIME MACHINE works quite well.
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