"The Time Machine"

John Logan's screenplay, based on the one David Duncan wrote for Pal's film, makes a few nice additions. Alexander's motivation for exploring travel in time works just fine, at least until the script adds one twist that makes you feel tricked for responding in the first place. Logan does better when Alexander winds up nearly a million years into the future, where the human race has split in two: the peaceful Eloi who live aboveground and the cannibalistic Morlocks shunning the light of day in underground caves.

In Pal's film the Eloi were blue-eyed, blond emotional zombies (like teenage versions of the kids in "The Village of the Damned"). These Eloi, a multiracial bunch featuring the pop singer Samantha Mumba (not much of an actress, but a lithe, attractive camera subject), at least have the emotional resources to know they're in danger from the Morlocks. The Morlocks themselves look like deformed, overgrown gnomes, but they are such CGI creations that they're never as scary as they should be. They have, however, acquired one neat new trick: the ability to rise out of the sand and slip back down into their cave world in the same way, their victims slung over the shoulder.

The best thing about this future world is that it's a lush movie jungle, set atop huge cliffs. The Elois' dwellings are especially nifty -- a community of treehouses hugging the cliffside. (It looks like a Tarzan and Jane version of Club Med.) There's also one nice addition to the Eloi world -- a hologram figure (played by the enormous-eyed comic Orlando Jones) left over from the New York Public Library, a repository of the information of civilizations past. There's a nice moment when the Eloi gather to hear Jones recite "Tom Sawyer" to them, but there's also one I could live without: Jeremy Irons, camping it up (though not enough) as the brain behind the Morlocks. In his tattered bondage gear, death-white skin and straight white hair, he looks like the retirement-home version of Marilyn Manson.

The biggest problem with "The Time Machine" is the dead weight at the center, namely Guy Pearce. Watching Pearce prance and hiss his way through the recent "The Count of Monte Cristo," I couldn't figure out why he chose to play a character who is supposed to be a lecherous, villainous blackguard in the effete, finicky, crypto-gay manner of old-movie baddies. Maybe he always dreamed of being Clifton Webb? Here, he wears a slugged look that's simultaneously simian-slow and voracious (he's all teeth and chin). Yes, he's supposed to be an absent-minded professor unaware of his unkempt appearance, but did he really have to have such pasty skin and lank, greasy hair? Whose idea of a scientist-hero is this, Charles Bukowski's?

There's no romance or fire or wit in Pearce's Alexander, just a mopey, gobsmacked expression that doesn't exactly inspire the confidence the Eloi -- or the audience -- need to feel in him. When he does something clever to outsmart Irons' Morlock pooh-bah, would it have been too much to ask for a trace of bloodthirsty joy from Pearce? The hero of "The Time Machine" needs to have the grace and precision and charm of an antique pocket watch. Pearce is like that Swatch you bought on a whim and forgot about a month later.

It's not much praise to say that "The Time Machine" is the sort of diversion that's better than you expect it to be. But we're almost a quarter of the way through a year that so far has offered no genuinely entertaining mainstream movies. Kids (say, aged 8 or 9 and up) might even respond to "The Time Machine" the way their parents did to Pal's version. I just wish it gave them a little more of the craftsman's pride and care that the earlier movie gave us.

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