The story of “The Time Machine” began its less than illustrious life as a book by H.G. Wells in 1895. Sixty-five years later, Hollywood noticed its cinema-friendly elements and made it into a cheesy sci-fi adventure film in 1960. Now, Dreamworks Pictures is trying to revive the story once again into a smash hit/special effects spectacle.
Guy Pierce (“Memento”) resumes his usual role of a man on a mission who is haunted by something in his past. Here, he is a Victorian inventor named Alexander who builds a time machine out of some gauges, a crystal and a chair. He first travels into the past in an attempt to rectify a wrong. When he finds his attempts thwarted by the pesky concept of fate, he decides to travel into the future in order to find answers.
The time-travel sequences are admittedly awesome. As the machine stands still, the world changes rapidly around it. Cities are built and destroyed in seconds before the viewer’s eyes. Extremely impressive CGI effects show the ceaseless cycle of growth and destruction in the world, which is thought provoking to say the least.
Special effects make a gripping appearance again midway through the film when the cannibalistic Morlocks are introduced. Their human-hunting sequences are nothing short of terrifying. The intensity of these scenes provides some of the best pulse-raising action in recent cinema.
The scariness and goriness of these scenes push the limits of the film’s PG-13 rating to the edge of acceptability. But even with controlled violence, the images of humans being rounded up like cattle by the Morlocks are quite disturbing.
However, in between fancy time-lapse displays and monster hunting parties, the film falls flat on its face. You can almost hear brakes screeching as the film careens to a dead stop.
In between action scenes, Alexander, in pursuit of answers, holds a series of extraordinarily boring conversations with humans, computers and Morlocks.
By the time the ending finally rolls around, “The Time Machine” has used up all of its nifty tricks.
In the last act, the screeching brakes sound joins in a chorus with the sound of scraping rock bottom. Alexander makes a hazardous journey underground and conducts a mind-numbing interview with uber-Morlock, Jeremy Irons (“Dungeons and Dragons”). This droll exchange is meant to reveal all the secrets of the film but it instead provides less excitement than watching paint peel. Finally, the film caps off the whole sordid mess with one of the cheesiest cop-out endings imaginable, and the viewer is left feeling unsatisfied and slightly annoyed.
Guy Pierce looks sleepy as he recites his way through the script. Pierce is joined on screen by pop singer Samantha Mumba. She gets points for effort, but even she cannot alleviate the ennui.
Director Simon Wells is the great grandson of H.G. Wells and presumably was selected just for this reason. Simon’s directorial experience consists of only animated children’s films such as “Balto” and “Fievel Goes West.” This should be no surprise, considering the only interesting parts of “The Time Machine” are the computer-animated sequences. Simon handles these scenes beautifully but is unable to direct live action effectively.
In a strange occurrence, there is a second director credited for the film. Gore Verbinski (“The Mexican”) stepped in to finish the film when Simon Wells dropped out due to “extreme exhaustion.” Perhaps he watched some his own film and felt the overwhelming urge to fall asleep.
In any event, “The Time Machine” is too concerned with moral postulating and not concerned enough with plot and plausibility. Everything in between the action scenes is just hold music.
“The Time Machine” is merely an excuse for special effects, and they cannot carry the film alone. Dreamworks obviously spent a great deal on this splashy feature, but they clearly overestimated the attention span of their audience. Someone took the adage “time is money” too seriously — in this case, time is just wasted.
