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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Director Simon Wells (H.G.'s descendant) invents an agreeable time-wasting device -- but George Pal's low-tech 1960 version still rules the epochs.
Mar 8, 2002 | "The Time Machine" is, for the most part, a handsome, pleasant entertainment. Perhaps because the idea of time travel holds out the promise of traveling hither and yon, the movie bogs down when the hero (Guy Pearce) settles into a primitive future. (That was a problem in the 1960 version starring Rod Taylor, too.) But the director, Simon Wells, still manages to bring the picture in at around 90 minutes, and with the exception of a battle sequence and the chase climax, he doesn't go in for a lot of the jagged, incoherent cutting that reduces most contemporary action sequences to visual gibberish. He also comes up with one genuinely graceful visual effect: a scene where characters from two different time periods, turn-of-the-century New York and New York a million years in the future, stand side by side in their respective time dimensions, unaware of each other. We watch as a Manhattan brownstone gives way to a leafy junglescape.
What the movie lacks is the simple affection for its material, the classic sci-fi novel by H.G. Wells, that characterized the 1960 film directed by George Pal. That picture was a studio job, but you could still feel that Pal was motivated by his love for Wells' tale. (You could feel the same in the 1953 film of "The War of the Worlds" that Pal produced and Byron Haskin directed.) Most people in their 30s and 40s saw Pal's version as kids on TV, and when they talk about it, you can tell they still retain a special affection for it. It's easy to see why. The movie has a plummy, storybook feel, and the special effects are rendered with an almost elegant simplicity. When H.G. Wells (played by Rod Taylor) sits in his time machine, Pal depicts epochs whizzing by via shots of the sun arcing repeatedly across the sky, the changing dress styles on a store mannequin across the way and, gradually, Wells' London house falling away to make room for other buildings.
Simon Wells (who is actually a descendant of H.G.) borrows some of Pal's effects, and they're not bad. As Pearce's Alexander Hartdegen ventures further and further into the future, we see flowers blooming and withering across the skylights of his laboratory, and finally, the very landscape around him changing; widespread destruction giving way to a second Ice Age, land masses forming and receding, vegetation returning to the planet. It's a clever, effective means of depicting the unimaginable future life of the planet.
But though the effects are far more complex than anything Pal could achieve, they aren't nearly as impressive. Perhaps this is because, with all the technology available to filmmakers today, you don't have to have any particular talent to amaze us. It's easy to show the earth slipping into a second ice age when you've got computer graphics and matte artists and millions of studio dollars at your disposal. ("The Time Machine" was a co-venture of Dreamworks and Warner Bros.) Sometimes, watching the new generation of special effects, what I see looks so real that it feels fake. Less technically sophisticated effects from films of the past often retain their capacity to invoke wonder, working at a simple, almost symbolic, level that can tap into real suggestive power.
"The Time Machine"
Directed by Simon Wells
Starring Guy Pearce, Samantha Mumba, Phyllida Law, Jeremy Irons
I'll say this for Simon Wells: He's not so in love with his effects that he lets them stop the movie dead. "The Time Machine" benefits from the charm of its conceit, and the sets and backgrounds of turn-of-the-century New York have that pleasing old-movie feel -- the sort that doesn't let you believe in what you're watching for a minute; what you respond to is the fact that all this has been made up to entertain you -- but it lacks any poetry of its own. And the movie doesn't wear you out with the pell-mell pacing that makes so many Hollywood pictures feel exhausting after 10 minutes; instead, it's a little sluggish.
