The Time Machine Directed by Simon Wells Written by John Logan Starring Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons and Samantha Mumba Classification: AA Rating: **½
Too often, the world of movies is a realm of infinite repetition -- of formulas slavishly followed and originals forever duplicated. There, the poor viewer exists in an eternal present, living out his own version of Groundhog Day, watching essentially the same picture over and over and over again. In such a place, where time stands still, a movie about time travel is, to say the least, ironic. And a remake of a movie about time travel goes way beyond irony -- it's just rather pale and absurd.
With that in mind, welcome to The Time Machine, a revisiting of George Pal's 1960 adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel. Pal's take on the book was visually delightful and occasionally clever; this one is always workmanlike and mainly pedestrian. It robs Wells's tale of its musings on the big questions of evolution and class and government, choosing to replace complex issues with simple narrative -- and an altered narrative at that.
Here, the anonymous "Time Traveller" gets an actual name, an American passport, a love interest and a brand new motive for his temporal wanderings. We pick up our hero Alexander (Guy Pearce) in a fairy-tale New York at the turn of the 20th century. He's the classic absent-minded professor, keen to make a fumbling proposal to his blond sweetheart. She accepts, only to die moments afterward in a violent mishap. A disconsolate Alex retreats to his lab, emerging four years later with a whiz-bang time machine and a fervent plan -- to whisk back to the past and redo those fateful seconds before his true love's death.
This amorous preface has some slight charm, but, thematically, it doesn't really lead anywhere. So the rest of the film is left to play catch-up with the book, as the script flashes forward to the future in order to align itself (more or less) with the original plot. It gets there eventually, but not before an amusing stopover in 2037, where Alex encounters a kind of cybertronic librarian, asks about the subject of time travel and is helpfully pointed toward a very good 1960 flick based on an even better novel. It's a lovely bit of self-deprecation, slyly inserted and adroitly handled.
We then move on to the meat of the movie, set in a very distant future when the planet has regressed into a tribal dialectic between the Eloi and the Morlocks -- the one a human and passive bunch of mountain dwellers, the other a simian and aggressive lot residing in the dark underworld.
There, Alex attracts more female attention (Samantha Mumba) and prepares for his climactic showdown with the "Uber-Morlock" -- Jeremy Irons, as it happens, in full leather and eye shadow, and long tresses, and looking altogether like a superannuated groupie at a Kiss concert.
Yes, just when things should heat up, they bog down -- the kinetic sequences are sluggish and the book's thoughtful side gets buried in the mire. Too bad because, until then, director Simon Wells (H. G.'s great-grandson, if press kits can be believed) had done a good, crisp job -- nothing too imaginative, but definitely uncluttered and efficient. His background is in animation (including The Prince of Egypt), and he's brought the same sort of clean lines to his live-action debut. Also, Pearce's presence is a boon. From L.A. Confidential to Memento, he's already proved himself a worthy addition to that expanding roster of Aussie imports -- another hunk who can act.
Ultimately, though, The Time Machine is a featureless feature. Watchable if never exciting, competent yet hardly exceptional, the picture is content to assume its innocuous position in the cinematic landscape. There, our moviegoer can look on from his usual vantage, from that timeless place where everything is the spitting image of everything else -- even the past and the future.