Filmgoers may find 'Time Machine' is time wasted

By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

THE TIME MACHINE (Rated PG-13 for violence, partial nudity) Two Stars (Fair) This high-tech makeover of H.G. Wells' classic story is long on effects, and short on brains and originality. Starring Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons, and in her feature film debut, singer Samantha Mumba. Directed by Simon Wells, the author's grandson. DreamWorks Films, 96 mins.

With his limp, center-parted hair and Victorian clothes, star Guy Pearce looks like Johnny Depp in "From Hell." Actress Sienna Guillory, who plays his love interest, looks like the young Jessica Lange.

The Eloi, the futuristic people the film's time traveler encounters, live in a world that owes a lot to that teddy-bear planet in "Return of the Jedi" — and their cliff dwellings resemble giant sconces. The evil Morlocks could be a cross between E.T. and Conan the Barbarian. And when he eventually shows up as the supreme bad guy, Jeremy Irons may be confused with albino blues guitarist Johnny Winter.

Everything about this film feels borrowed and recycled. "I wonder if we'll ever go too far," a friend of the film's hero asks at one point when, in fact, this whole thing has really gone far enough.

The film tells the story of Alex Hartdegen (Pearce), a professor in 1899 with a fascination about time. He also happens to be in love with Emma (Guillory), who dies unexpectedly. Consumed with grief, Alex sinks the next four years working on a machine that will allow him to change the past.

Once Alex gets his machine working (minus even the most cursory explanation of his time-travel principle), he discovers that, though he can go back in time, he can't change the past. So he goes into the future, stopping in 2030 before accidentally being punted 800,000 years farther forward.

There, he encounters the Eloi, a seemingly peaceful agrarian society in a primitive future. He also finds the Morlocks, clunky monsters with faces like a child's papier-mache horror mask. Alex has, in fact, stumbled into a distinctively Darwinistic society in which it is eat or be eaten — with the Morlocks as the hunter-gatherers and the Eloi as the hunted and gathered.

The script takes large liberties with the source material but substitutes Hollywood cliche and bombast in place of any distinctive vision of the future. The conclusive battle makes little sense, as Alex uses time rays as a kind of neutron bomb that only kills Morlocks.

Pearce spends the film's first hour blithering like Jimmy Stewart in a Frank Capra film or, perhaps, "Seinfeld's" Cosmo Kramer. It's not his fault that the film around him looks so flimsy but he could have resisted this reductive notion of the absent-minded professor.

"The Time Machine" is like one of those big expensive toys that looks like fun on TV, until you actually get it home and realize you've been snookered again.

Rated PG-13 for violence, partial nudity.