Description
The Time Machine
Genre: Sci-Fi, Adventure, Action
Year: 2002
Country: USA
Runtime: 91 min
Director: Simon Wells
Cast: Guy Pearce, Samantha Mumba, Mark Addy, Sienna Guillory, Phyllida Law
.: Plot :.
Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) is a shy, dedicated scientist living in 1899 New York City. Obsessed with the idea of time travel, he teaches at Columbia University as a professor of "Applied Mechanics and Engineering" and gets into trouble for his radical theories. One day, on his way to the park to meet his girlfriend Emma (Sienna Guillory), he becomes distracted by a motor car beside the park gates. He puts himself in immediate good graces with the driver who, while refueling, forgot to activate the parking brake – something Alexander does quickly when it threatens to get out of control. While walking in the park with Emma, Alex proposes to her. The romantic moment is short-lived; a robber emerges from nearby bushes and holds a gun on them. Alexander gives him all the money he has, but the robber also wants Emma's ring; both Alexander and Emma refuse to give it up. During the struggle that follows, the gun goes off and Emma is fatally wounded, dying in Alexander's arms.
For the next four years, Alexander spends every waking hour working on his time travel calculations, and eventually succeeds in building a working time machine. His self-imposed exile has led to him being ostracized from his oldest friend David Philby (Mark Addy), who arrives at the lab to confront Alexander who in turn flies into a rage. Philby invites Alexander to dinner in the hope it would cause him to leave the lab and return to a normal life, but Alexander postpones the dinner until the following week; after Philby has left Alexander remarks that in a week they "wouldn't have had this conversation".
When the time machine gets completed on February 3, 1903 he travels back to January 18, 1899 and intercepts Emma before she was destined to meet his 1899 counterpart. Escorting her away from the park where they would meet the robber, they walk back to her apartment where he leaves her out in the street to buy her some flowers. However, despite Alexander having removed her from the danger of the robber, Emma is knocked down and trampled by a horse and carriage outside. The horse was scared by the motor car which Alexander helped to stop before. Alexander realizes bitterly that if he prevents one means of Emma's death, another will take its place. Disenchanted with the prospect, he decides to go forward in time to find out if there are any answers in the future.
There follows a semi-montage sequence of Alexander in the machine, gliding past 1905...1919...1924, and so on, but as he moves forward in time, the camera moves back in space, showing propeller planes whirring over erecting scaffolding, jet planes soaring over skyscraper-laden New York, high-tech weather balloons transmitting signals to the Eastern Seaboard, space stations hovering over the Earth, and finally, we zoom out to the Moon, where we see rockets heading toward bases.
Alexander stops on May 24, 2030 and learns that the Moon is being prepared for colonization. He visits the New York Public Library where he talks with Vox 114, a holographic AI librarian. Vox has information on H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and even one of his own papers, but not on time travel, stating that such a thing is impossible.
The Morlocks have found Alexander's time machine and have brought it underground. With the U"ber-Morlock about to send Alexander back, he hands Alexander his pocket watch. Suddenly, Alexander pulls him into the machine's sphere with him, pushing the control lever far forward, taking himself and the U"ber-Morlock into the far future. The two fight until Alexander pushes him outside of the time sphere, and stares as the U"ber-Morlock hyper-ages, disintegrating outside the time bubble. Exhausted, Alexander slows the machine as the sky appears overhead, revealing a harsh, red-oxide color. He is now in the year 635,427,810 AD, and the landscape is a desolate wasteland as far as the eye can see, dotted with immense, sinister, Morlock surface entrances. In the distance, Alexander sees a human-like procession walking slowly.
Finally accepting that he can never save Emma, Alexander travels back in time to rescue Mara. After freeing her, he sets the time machine to forward, but jamming the controls with his watch, causing it to malfunction and create a time distortion stream. Alexander, Mara, Kalen and their tribe escape to the surface as the time stream disintegrates the Morlocks.
Given a new purpose and future, Alexander resolves to build a new life for himself, Mara and the Eloi, with the help of Vox and his vast record of history. The closing scene is shown side by side with a sequence in the year 1903, where David Philby chats with Alexander's elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Watchit, reflecting that he hopes Alexander has found somewhere he can be happy, before leaving and throwing away his bowler hat on the street as a small tribute to a conversation they had had before the accident, wherein Alexander had wanted his students to be free thinkers and to "knock off every bowler they saw."
Rating: 5.6/10
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