THE TIME MACHINE (2002 film)

THE TIME MACHINE. Gore Verbinksi and Simon Wells (great-grandson of H. G. Wells), dir. Based on the novel by H. G. Wells, q.v. under fiction. David Duncan, then John Logan, script. USA: DreamWorks SKG and Warner Bros., 2002.

In useful figurative dialog with the 1895 Wells novel and the 1960 G. Pal film. The initial setting is shifted from 1890s London to 1890s New York City; The Time Traveler is given a name (Alexander Hartdegen) and a lost beloved, whose death—and Hartdegen's knowledge of A. Einstein's very early work—inspires him to travel back in time to prevent her murder. The Time Machine in the 2002 movie is rather po-mo in its "busyness," but it is shiny in its brass and glass and stresses light, including what looks like early laser light; the device that preserves the past involves holograms, and therefore is also based in light. The underworld of the Morlocks is po-mo and Industrial, as opposed to the cleaner lines of the underworld in the Pal film, and these latest Morlocks have a hive-like hierarchy, overseen at least locally by Jeremy Irons's "Über-Morlock." There is also a shift in accounting for the evolution of the Morlocks; after the Moon was mostly destroyed and fell, many human survivors went underground, giving rise to the Morlocks, while some survived above, to become the Eloi. The novel's most directly political points are modified in having the destruction of the Moon caused by atomic explosions sponsored by (Capitalist) developers of Moon property and by having the Eloi living as cliff-dwellers above a river in what looks like a rain forest. The Über-Morlock is albino-white and the surface-going Morlocks grey; the Eloi are more diverse, with the major Eloi (played by Omero Mumba and Samantha Mumba) brown-skinned.