I recently went and saw the remake of The Time Machine. I saw the original when I was a kid, and it creeped the hell out of me. In other words, I quite enjoyed it. So, I was curious to see what they did with the story with modern special effects. On the special effects count, they did alright, The time machine looked really good, and the time travel scenes were well done. Also, Guy Pearce did a pretty good job as the main character, Alexander Hartdegen (it was H. G. Wells in the original). However, I think the screenwriter needs to be taken out and shot. One of the major plot points to the original was H.G.'s fascination with time travel and his interest in how humanity would evolve. In the remake, they almost completely remove any of his interest in time travel, and make his whole trip through time as an attempt to get his dead girlfriend back. Also, I found the Eloi a little too PC. Instead of having the passive, uncaring people who don't notice when a fellow Eloi is drowning and then walking calmly to their doom, you have the poor, persecuted Eloi who lovingly commemorate those taken by the Morlocks with weird windmill thingy's(???). My one other gripe was the really bad logic gaps, like the Morlocks(whom the movie clearly states can't go out in daylight) being out in the daytime, and I still don't know what the hell was going on with the time machine explosion at the end. And I'm still not sure what I think of the Jeremy Irons third species. Of course, I only pick on logic gaps when I'm down on a movie like that, because I've liked movies with worse logic gaps.

Now, to be fair, I went back and watched the original afterwards, and although I liked it a hell of a lot better than the remake, it wasn't perfect either. It reeks of being made in the 50's (it came out in 1960), especially in the scenes with Weena, where it's very clear she's a damsel in distress needing a man to save her. But for the time period, the special effects were quite good, using stop motion animation to show the rapid passage of time. One thing that bugged me about it this time around; the fact that he spends the entire movie bemoaning the fact that the human race keeps getting into wars and violence but then triumphantly coerces the Eloi into violently overthrowing the Morlocks. I don't know if they were trying to make a point with this, or if they just didn't really think about it. Also, the whole time I couldn't get it out of my head how much Rod Taylor looks like Robin Williams. I've looked it up and there's no relation, but I swear he's his illegitimate father or something.

Of course, I can't really make a fair comparison without having read the book, which I will probably do quite soon.

Update: Ok, I went and read the book. I was surprised to see that the book was only 85 pages long, but honestly that's about the right length for a movie basis. The character naming was a bit odd, the cast in the opening scene consists of: The Time Traveler(the main character), The Psychologist, The Provincial Mayor, The Medical Man, The Very Young Man, Filby(???), and the narrator who doesn't bother to name himself. The drawing room scene was pretty much the same as the 1960 movie, as was the scene where he tells the story of his journey though time. However, both movies change from the book drastically at this point, in that H.G. Well's Time Travel goes straight to the year 802701 and meets the Eloi. This doesn't bother me as I liked the near future sections of both movies. Being that both of these sections were original, I thought that it was interesting how they both reflect fears for the time period the film was made. In the old one, there's the very blatant nuclear paranoia, where the new one has a more modern(although not new) fear of technology going to far.

The one thing that I think that bothered me about both movies was the fact that I never quite bought their stories of how the Morlocks and Eloi came to be. Both of them make the world of 802701 a result of their respective disasters. The 1960 film proposes that in the aftermath of the nuclear war, the human race split up and half went underground, and the other half stayed above. The 2002 movie uses the partial destruction of the moon as the reason for the split. Neither of the movies give satisfactory explanations as to why the Eloi, which were living in the supposably uninhabitable area, are unchanged physically in the far future. Also, the 1960 movie doesn't ever explain how the Eloi came to be ruled over by the Morlocks (I can accept the rule by force of the 2002 one).

In the book, the Morlocks and Eloi evolved from the working class and the upper class (yes, there's some definite communist or socialist metaphors going on here). The idea is that at some point in the future you actually have the working class working and producing underground, while the aristocracy lives on the surface. The relationship between the two becomes so perfect that all all needs are met and all human advancement slowly disappears. The working class develops into the Morlocks, physically strong and well adapted to living in the dark underground. The upper class, having all their needs met without any challenges, devolve into the dim-witted Eloi (who in the book are only about 4 feet high). Then at some point, the Morlocks food ran out for some reason, and having more or less control of the Eloi because they were the providers, they begin to farm the Eloi like cattle for food.

The other interesting thing in the book was the fact that, after getting his time machine back from the Morlocks, The Time Traveler does not immediately return to his own time. Instead he goes millions of years into the future to when the earth is a cold husk, barely sustaining life.

• Official Website of the new movie
• The book. Yes, I mean the whole thing, you don't have to go out and buy it like I did.
• IMDB entry for the 1960 version.
• IMDB entry for the 2002 version.