Jump to content

The Time Machine (2002 film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Predator106 (talk | contribs) at 22:51, 12 December 2009 (→‎Plot: the time machine didn't stop itself, he did.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Time Machine.
Promotional poster for The Time Machine
Directed bySimon Wells
Gore Verbinski (uncredited)
Written byH. G. Wells (novel)
David Duncan (earlier screenplay)
John Logan (screenplay)
Produced byWalter F Parkes
David Valdes
StarringGuy Pearce
Samantha Mumba
Mark Addy
Sienna Guillory
Phyllida Law
Alan Young
Omero Mumba
Yancey Arias
With Orlando Jones
And Jeremy Irons
CinematographyDonald McAlpine
Edited byWayne Wahrman
Music byKlaus Badelt
Distributed byDreamWorks (USA)
Warner Bros. (non-USA)
Release date
March 8, 2002
Running time
96 min
LanguageEnglish
Budget$80 million
Box office$123,729,176

The Time Machine is a 2002 science fiction film adapted from the 1895 novel of the same name by H. G. Wells, and the 1960 film screenplay by David Duncan. It was executive-produced by Arnold Leibovit and directed by Simon Wells, who is the great-grandson of the original author, and stars Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons, Orlando Jones, Samantha Mumba, Mark Addy, Sienna Guillory, and Phyllida Law with a cameo by Alan Young, who also appeared in the 1960 film adaptation.

The 2002 film is set in New York City instead of London and contains new story elements not present in the original novel, including a romantic back story and several new characters, such as an intelligent hologram played by Orlando Jones and a leader of the Morlocks played by Jeremy Irons.

Director Gore Verbinski was brought in to take over the last 18 days of shooting, as Simon Wells was suffering from "extreme exhaustion". Wells returned for post-production.[1]

In 2009, work is underway on a sequel to The Time Machine to be titled The Time Machine Returns (or possibly Time Machine II)[2]. It is being produced by Arnold Leibovit.

Plot

Alexander Hartdegen (Pearce) is a young scientist who lives in New York City in the year 1899, teaching at Columbia University and cared for by his housekeeper Mrs. Watchit (Law). Unlike his conservative friend David Philby (Addy), Alexander would rather do pure research than contribute to a culture in which all men wear "identical bowler hats".

When Alexander meets with his sweetheart Emma (Guillory) in a park, a robber holds them at gunpoint and kills Emma. Wishing to save her, Alexander devotes himself to building a time machine, and when the machine is completed four years later, he travels back to 1899 and intercepts Emma before her meeting with his younger counterpart. This prevents her from dying in the park, but now she is killed by a horse and carriage.

Seeing that one means of Emma's death has been replaced by another, Alexander goes to the year 2030 to find out whether her life can be saved. At the New York Public Library, he talks with Vox 114 (Jones), a holographic AI librarian, but finds no information on time travel. He then continues into the future until 2037 where detonations on the Moon destroy most of the city. When he restarts the machine to avoid falling debris, he is knocked unconscious and travels to the year 802,701 before waking up.

At this point in time, human civilization has reverted to a primitive lifestyle. The survivors, called "Eloi", live on the sides of cliffs on what remains of Manhattan. Alexander stops the time machine and is nursed back to health by a woman named Mara (Samantha Mumba), one of the few Eloi who speak English. One night, Alexander and Mara's young brother Kalen (Omero Mumba) dream of a frightening, jagged-toothed face, and the next day, the Eloi are attacked and Mara is dragged underground by ape-like monsters called "Morlocks" that hunt the Eloi for food. In order to rescue her, Kalen leads Alexander to Vox 114, which is still functioning.

After Vox tells Alexander how to find the Morlocks, he enters their underground realm through an opening that resembles the face in his nightmare, but he is captured and thrown into an area where Mara sits in a cage. There he meets an intelligent, humanoid Über-Morlock (Irons), who explains that Morlocks are the evolutionary descendants of the humans who stayed underground after the Moon broke apart, while Eloi are evolved from those who remained on the surface. Über-Morlocks are a caste of telepaths who rule the hunters that prey on Eloi.

Meanwhile, the Morlocks have brought the time machine underground. After the Über-Morlock explains that Alexander cannot alter Emma's fate because her death was what drove him to build the time machine in the first place, Alexander gets into the machine to return home. However, he suddenly pulls the Über-Morlock into the machine, which carries them into the future as they fight. The Über-Morlock dies by rapidly aging when Alexander pushes him outside of the machine's sphere of influence. Alexander then stops in the year 635,427,810, revealing a harsh, rust-colored sky over a wasteland of Morlock caves.

Finally accepting that he cannot save Emma, Alexander travels back to rescue Mara. After freeing her, he starts the time machine and jams its gears, creating a violent distortion in time. Alexander and Mara escape to the surface as a huge explosion destroys the Morlocks and their caves. With the time machine gone, Alexander begins a new life with Mara and the Eloi. The film ends with two scenes in the same geographical location, as well as the same revelation, displayed in parallel: While Alexander shows Mara and Kalen a field that was once his home, having finally discovered solace in this new time, Philby and Mrs. Watchit sadly discuss his absence, and, after suggesting to Mrs. Watchit that she should transfer her duties over to his home whilst Alexander remains absent, Philby is seen outside the residence tossing his identical bowler hat into the wind finally discovering his own social independence.

Cast

Noted on the DVD

Deleted scenes

  • A scene was removed from the opening of the film, showing a practical experiment by Alexander Hartdegen explaining thermals; the scene led to a brief conversation between Hartdegen and the Dean of Columbia University. Evidence of the removed scene can be seen in cast members looking directly at the camera (originally intended to represent the point of view of the Dean) and a collection of coats left in Hartdegen's classroom.
  • A scene that was scripted, but abandoned as it was considered inappropriate in light of the then recent events of September 11, 2001, was to have shown sections of the shattered moon crashing into the futuristic skyscrapers of 2037 New York City. This led to a 3 month delay of the film's theatrical release.
  • The scenes of college life and of Hartdegen as a professor, which were cut from the film, were shot at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Alternate sequences

A selection of scenes and sequences are shown in the trailers to have notable differences from those seen in the final film. These include:

  • An alternate cloud pattern and fewer futuristic skyscrapers in the establishing pan sequence of the 2030 New York Public Library.
  • Alternate identification and menu graphics appear on the transparent display screens of the Vox hologram system within the library.
  • A possible 'alternate future' depicts Hartdegen and the time machine, standing on a sunny hillside before a small futuristic settlement, set by a lake with sail-vehicles, within the changed leafy landscape of what was once New York.

Production

The movie was a co-production of DreamWorks and Warner Bros. (the latter of which owned the rights to the original film) in association with Arnold Leibovit Entertainment[3] who obtained the rights to the George Pal original Time Machine 1960 and collectively negotiated the deal that made it possible for both Warner Brothers and Dreamworks to make the film.

Special effects

The Morlocks (in the story, semi-humanoid creatures that dwell in the future) were depicted using actors in costumes wearing animatronic masks. For scenes in which they run on all fours faster than humanly possible, Industrial Light and Magic created CGI versions of the creatures.[4]

Many of the time traveling scenes were entirely computer generated, including a 33-second shot in the workshop where the time machine is located. The camera pulls out, traveling through a city and then into space and past the moon to reveal earth's lunar colonies. Plants and buildings are shown springing up and then being replaced by new growth in a constant cycle. In later shots, the effects team used an erosion algorithm to digitally simulate the Earth's landscape changing through the centuries.[4]

For some of the lighting effects used for the digital time bubble around the time machine, ILM developed an extended-range color format, which they named rgbe (red, green blue, and an exponent channel) (See Paul E. Debevec and Jitendra Malik, "Recovering High Dynamic Range Radiance Maps from Photographs, Siggraph Proceedings, 1997).[4]

Soundtrack

A full score was written by Klaus Badelt, with the recognizable theme being the track "I don't belong here", which was later used in the 2008 Discovery Channel Mini series "When We Left Earth".[citation needed]

Critical reception

The film received a 28% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 144 critic reviews[5]. Many critics preferred the earlier film and the original novel, implying that the story lacked the heart of its previous conceptions. William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who was somewhat positive about the film, writes that it lacks some of the simplicity and charm of the 1960 George Pál film by adding characters such as Jeremy Iron's "uber-morlock". However, he praised actor Guy Pearce's "more eccentric" time traveler and his transition from an awkward intellectual to a man of action.[6] Victoria Alexander of Filmsinreview.com wrote that "The Time Machine is a loopy love story with good special effects but a storyline that's logically incomprehensible," [7] noting some "plot holes" having to deal with Hartdegen and his machine's cause-and-effect relationship with the outcome of the future. Other critics claimed that the film had (or had the potential for) an interesting, valuable social commentary, and preferred the revised version of the story presented in the new film. In a slightly more negative light, Jay Carr of the Boston Globe writes: "The truth is that Wells wasn't that penetrating a writer when it came to probing character or the human heart. His speculations and gimmicks were what propelled his books. The film, given the chance to deepen its source, instead falls back on its gadgets". Another view is that the film makes the mistake of Americanizing Dr. Hartdegen. Contrary to Wells' novel, the beginning of the film takes place in the United States rather than Great Britain.

Some critics praised the special effects, declaring the film visually impressive and colorful, while others thought the effects were poor. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times found the Morlock animation cartoonish and unrealistic, due to their manner of leaping and running.[8] However, Ebert notes the contrast in terms of the social/racial representation of the attractive Eloi between the two films... between the "dusky sun people" of this version and the Nordic race in the George Pal film. Aside from its vision of the future, the film's recreation of New York at the turn of the century won it some praise. Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle writes "The far future may be awesome to consider, but from period detail to matters of the heart, this film is most transporting when it stays put in the past."

See also

References

  1. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268695/trivia
  2. ^ http://www.imdb.com/company/co0072275/
  3. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268695/companycredits
  4. ^ a b c Barbara Robertson, About Time: Digital Domain and ILM developed new technologies to create effects for the movie The Time Machine, Computer Graphics World, March 2002, Volume 25 Number 3, pages 24-25
  5. ^ http://www.rottentomatoes.com,"[1]"
  6. ^ Seattleepi.nwsource.com, "[2]"
  7. ^ http://www.rottentomatoes.com,"[3]"
  8. ^ http://rogerebert.suntimes.com,"[4]"

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Time_Machine_(2002_film)&oldid=331329916"