Enkomputiligis Don HARLOW
This is a fairly good, but in some ways quite unfaithful, adaptation of H. G. Wells' short novel The Time Machine. I suppose no one will scream "spoilers" if I sketch idea behind the story here. A turn of the century scientist invents a machine for traveling through time. He uses it to journey into the distant future, where he finds that the human race has split into two species the surface-dwelling, elfin Eloi, who live in a land of plenty and have lost civilization as we know it; and the cavern-dwelling, ambitious, highly intelligent but cruel Morlocks who sit a bit higher in the food chain than the Eloi.
People who see this version are inevitably going to compare it with the George Pal film (mentioned by AI Orlando Jones in this film), and probably to deprecate it. To some extent, this is an example of the same syndrome that led to the numerous screams of 1987-1990 that Captain Kirk was infinitely superior to Captain Picard (though even then I thought that Picard had it all over Kirk), but there may be some justice in this case.
We may quickly pass over the fact that scientist Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce, fresh from being the villainous Fernand Mondego in The Count of Monte Christo) -- I don't remember that he had a name in the original story, or even in the Pal version -- has been moved from London to New York, where he teaches at Columbia University. The journey into the future has very similar steps in the two films -- a quick jump to test the machine, a somewhat longer jump into the future of the time when the movie was made (1) while we watch hemlines rise and fall on a manequin in a store across the street, a catastrophe that traps the time machine in a state of almost unstoppable flight into the future (2), finally the encounter with the Eloi and the Morlocks in the distant future.
There are some major changes at the end. In the novel and the Pal version the inventor returns to the present, though only temporarily, before setting off again; Wells leaves his fate uncertain, Pal suggests that he will help the Eloi rebuild civilization. In this version, Hartdegen uses his machine to destroy the Morlock empire, and never returns, though we do get a montage of Hartdegen and the Eloi Mara (Samantha Mumba) coupled with Philby (Mark Addy) and housekeeper Mrs. Watchit (Phyllida Law) in the twentieth century, sharing the same space but not the same time. The wintertime flower (Wells and Pal) is perforce completely omitted here. But this is also not something to complain about, in my opinion.
The first of two real problems is motivation and pacing. Neither Wells nor Pal required that their Inventor need any other motivation than the urge to invent and travel through time. Hartdegen required a greater push. So he is given a girl friend, a meeting in Central Park, a mugging that goes terribly wrong, four years spent building a machine to go back and undo the damage, a misfired attempt to short-circuit the death of fiancee Emma, and only then does Hartdegen go haring off into the future, trying to find out why he can't change the past (Über-Morlock Jeremy Irons, who is the brains of the Morlock underground empire, gives him a satisfying explanation). What this gives us is almost half an hour of extraneous motivation in a movie that's only an hour and a half long. Did we really need that?
The other problem -- and it may be a personal problem of mine -- is that neither Pal nor Simon Wells (the director, and grandson of the original author) cared, perhaps for reasons of political correctness, to recognize the original cause d'être of the split between Eloi and Morlocks. Wells based it in the cutthroat capitalism of the 19th century; the Eloi were the descendants of the factory owners, the Morlocks the descendants of the workers, forced underground while the owners turned the upper world into their own personal playground, or so I remember the story. This mythology is unacceptable in today's world (one wonders whether a Soviet film version of this story would have been more faithful to Wells' vision ...), and so the split occurred because of a global war (Pal) or the breakup of the moon and the resultant bombardment of the earth (the current film).
I also found the explanation for the Eloi's knowledge of English to be a bit ingenuous; I find it difficult to believe that one can learn a language with English's deviations from phoneticity by reading a collection of relic street signs (how do you pick up verbs, for instance?), even assuming that said signs were likely to survive eight hundred thousand years of exposure to the elements.
Keep an eye open for a brief cameo appearance by 82-year-old Alan Young (David and James Philby, possibly spelled "Filby", in the Pal version of forty years ago); I have a special spot in my heart for this actor, since I went to school with one of his daughters and he was MC at our graduation party. Young gets almost-star-billing in the opening credits, even though he appears for at most two seconds.
Lots of nifty special effects. The new time machine itself is infinitely superior, again in my humble opinion, to Pal's (or even the one in Time After Time, in which Wells himself came to 1978 to catch Jack the Ripper); but if you get a chance to ride in it, be sure to obey the usual travel rules and not stick your arm out the window. The Eloi city is also head-and-shoulders above that in the Pal version. If you can tolerate the first half hour, and don't mind the deviations from earlier versions, you should enjoy this one.