I Understand Now
why I didn’t remember much of anything about the 2002 Time Machine remake. It’s forgettable. Or it’s better to forget it, if you’ve seen it.
Guy Pearce kind of stumbles through the film with a deer in the headlights expression on his face. Jeremy Irons should have been taken out back and shot for his performance. And a lot of it was annoying.
It seems to me that a “mad scientist” who devotes his life to developing a time machine doesn’t need an additional reason to, you know, use his time machine once he’s developed it, but the screenwriter obviously did, and added a really stupid reason: He tries to change the past and can’t, so he travels to the future to find out why he can’t.
There’s a Magic Negro, this time a Photonic Magic Negro, sort of a master word database of all human knowledge. That was annoying — and so was the actor.
The Eloi aren’t the childlike zombies of the George Pal movie, but sort of a big, lesbian collective kinda thing. They’re the cliff dwellers redux, living on the sides of cliffs in huts. They fish, and climb up the cliffs to their lesbian collective huts on rope ladders, which they pull up at night (boats too). Visually, those shots were pretty neat.
But it’s one of those movies you don’t want to think about, because as soon as you start, it falls apart. It reminded me of Menotti’s opera, The Telephone. The plot is so stupid and illogical that you have to literally turn off your brain. In Menotti’s opera, we have a couple in some Soviet bloc nation. The man gets papers from the underground and leaves. She knows all of the same people in the underground, but instead of also getting papers and getting out, she whimpers beside the telephone, waiting for him to call — and we’re supposed to feel sorry for this idiot.
Well, Time Machine is a lot like that. Let’s take the living on the sides of cliffs thing. The Morlock live in caverns, like the original. So do these caverns extend upward inside the cliffs, and if so, why didn’t the Morlock merely tunnel through and snatch their dinner out of the huts? If not, why live on the sides of the cliffs, why not on high ground above the cliffs, where the Morlock can’t easily get to you? And why would the Eloi ever go down at all and possibly get barbecued, instead of up, where they wouldn’t?
They weren’t childlike or zombies, like the original. They were just stupid.
Look, don’t bother, or you’ll spend several weeks trying to forget that you saw it, like I did.
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