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Why can’t a man change the past?
That’s the question that Alexander Hartegan (Guy Pearce) obsesses over as he builds a time machine and journeys through time. Heartbroken over the death of the love of his life, he begins by traveling back in time, in an attempt to prevent her death (which only leads to her dying in a different way).
Alex then decides to travel into the future for an explanation. Instead, he finds a twenty-first-century world that’s taken science too far -- to the point that it’s caused the moon’s destruction and Earth’s downfall. Once again, he rushes ahead in time -- this time, 800,000 years ahead, past the destruction and the rebuilding of Earth. There, he finds a world that’s divided into two species -- one human-looking species that lives above the ground and one blood-thirsty ape-looking species that lives below ground.
The Time Machine was missing something for me. It wasn’t the acting -- Guy Pearce did a great job (just like he did in Memento). And it definitely wasn’t the effects. The way the film lets you watch hundreds of years -- or even hundreds of thousands of years -- pass before your eyes is definitely impressive. But perhaps that’s the problem. The effects were too impressive. So much time and effort was put into creating whiz-bang effects and scary-looking beasts (that reminded me a bit too much of Planet of the Apes, which, if you’ve read my review, isn’t a good thing) that the story suffered. At times, it was cheesy, making silly references to H.G. Wells and to the movies and musicals that were based on his book, and at other times, it was just downright confusing. I often found myself wondering what the point of the story really was. That’s not to say that H.G. Wells wrote a bad novel. I don’t know -- I haven’t read it. But I think the filmmakers tried to squeeze too much story into too little time. If they would have put a little extra time and effort into the story, the film would have been much better.
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