The Time Machine

The lavish new version of The Time Machine, which stars Guy Pearce as H.G. Wells' questing traveler, isn't bad, but it's not terrific, either. It's one of those films you wish were longer (it runs about 100 minutes), but only if it were better, smarter, grander. Every five minutes there's an arresting image.Every 10 minutes there's an idea worth lingering over. But director Simon Wells (great-grandson of H.G.) and writer John Logan don't linger; either that, or the film was massively cut. If you're one of those folks for whom the phrase "science fiction" equals "special effects," you'll be satisfied, if not always entranced, but buffs are likely to sigh and mutter, "Screwed again."

Logan, who's one of the credited writers (or rewriters) of Gladiator and Any Given Sunday, based his script on David Duncan's adaptation of the 1960 Time Machine, which is fondly remembered for its elaborate time-lapse photography and stop-motion animation (courtesy of producer/director George Pal, a master showman). Unfortunately, this new Machine, like its predecessor, prefers spectacle to thought. At least the spectacle is spectacular.

Here, as in the Pal film, the most engrossing parts come early, when turn-of-the-century scientist Alexander (Pearce) is soaring through the temporal landscape in a machine that suggests an unholy fusion of a gyroscope, a turret gun and the innards of a stopwatch. (Oliver Scholl's intelligent, playful, period-teasing production design is the film's true star.) Like Rod Taylor's traveler in the 1960 version, Pearce's character is enfolded by a womblike temporal bubble; science protects him from the ravaging storm of time's passage, allowing him to watch the scudding clouds, the changing seasons, the destruction and reconstruction of cities, the shifting of continents and stars. Computer animation takes Pal's stop-motion visions one step further (although, for me, the fact that the work was done with ones and zeros rather than human hands removes any sense of awe). Alexander's time machine stays inside the glassed-in greenhouse laboratory behind his house, but the camera never stops moving, swooping around the greenhouse exterior as ivy forms, wilts and reforms, then pushing through the glass (a nifty Citizen Kane homage) and swooping over Alexander's head, showing us the interior of the lab, then the piling-up of crates and boxes (signifying his presumed death) and the transformation of the space into a garage full of motorcars.

Then he fast-forwards through the centuries, stopping to witness the rise of a 21st-century city (it looks rather like the city in Rintaro's dazzling anime feature Metropolis) and the death of civilization. (In the 1960 version, it was caused by war; here, it's the fault of overzealous corporate engineers dynamiting the moon to build underground colonies, ripping that satellite from its orbit and tearing it apart.) Director Wells is merely competent, but the very idea of time travel is conveyed so simply and directly, welding every frame to the core idea of endless death and rebirth, that you can't help getting swept up. After Alexander emerges 800,000 years in the future, the primal spectacle of time travel ends, and we're back to the same simplistic good guys-bad guys stuff that ultimately exposed the 1960 Machine as a cheerful bastardization of Wells.

As any diligent schoolchild knows, Wells' far-future Earth has split humanity into two races, the frail, sunlight-dwelling Eloi and the pale, apelike, subterranean Morlocks. Here, as in the Pal version, our hero is horrified by the Morlocks' brutality and sides with the Eloi against them. The basic events of Wells' book aren't terribly different, but they occur within a political and social context. Wells, a political comparison-shopper who at that time held socialist sympathies, suggested that the Eloi were descendants of the privileged classes who lost contact with daily struggle and mutated into helpless sheep. The Morlocks were metaphoric exaggerations of the laboring class; hundreds of thousand of years after the dawn of industrialized exploitation, here they were, having their revenge?literally eating the ruling class for breakfast.

Accidentally or on purpose, Pal's film turned Wells' satire inside out, giving us an English gentleman who sided with futuristic descendants of his own kind. This new version, produced by Hollywood's most liberal major studio, DreamWorks, flirts with contemporary relevance, but in ways that muddle Wells' message even further. Here, the Eloi aren't fragile, elfish creatures, but dark-skinned results of 800 millennia of race mixing (the hero's love interest, Mara, is played by pop star Samantha Mumba; she's not asked to give anything resembling a performance, but she's sweet to look at, and there's piercing intelligence behind her eyes). The ivory-skinned, narrow-nostriled Morlock warriors are vicious, motiveless exploiters who answer to members of a higher Morlock caste, a splinter race of smaller, more svelte, extremely verbose thinkers. (Their leader is played by Jeremy Irons, in long white locks and pointy nails; he looks like leader Desslok from the imported Japanese sci-fi cartoon Star Blazers.) Their underground world is a demonic butcher shop, complete with slave plantation manacles and torture implements. These Morlocks are orcs crossed with Nazis?the baddest white people in film history. When Alexander braves the depths of their malignancy to rescue the kidnapped Mara, he falls into a pit full of skulls, body parts and melted flesh, recalling Haing S. Ngor's horrific emergence into a landscape of human remains in The Killing Fields.

These risky, potentially offensive images promise an intelligent, provocative sci-fi epic; too bad it's not the one you're watching. In the spirit of Francis Coppola's misbegotten, already dated 1992 Dracula, this Machine saddles its hero with a supposedly touching but wholly unnecessary "personal" backstory (his fiancee was killed by a mugger, and he invented the time machine to go back to save her). This Time Machine is yet another super-expensive, intellectually undernourished storybook adventure, pointlessly relocated from London to New York and tricked up with CGI and eardrum-crushing digital sound effects. (Pearce, dancing with chronology again post-Memento, gives the weirdest, least effective performance of his career; his fidgety body language suggests the onset of palsy, and his "American" accent sounds like Jimmy Stewart eating peanut butter.) The picture has a literary pedigree, but it still plays like a promo reel for different special-effects houses. The flashes of intelligence and daring are just spice?bits of jalapeno mixed into f/x porridge.

Hollywood has a long history of mining science fiction for spectacle and discarding the stuff that makes it worth discussing?politics, social commentary, pure speculation. Detractors of the genre complain that the plotting is often weak and the characters are straw men (and women) bereft of idiosyncrasy and psychological weight; yet it's precisely these supposed shortcomings that define the finest, richest, most lasting sci-fi movies: Metropolis, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Alien, Blade Runner. These films bypass commercial moviemaking conventions, serving up the future of society (and biology) with dreamlike bluntness, allowing you to project yourself onto the screen, then intelligently discuss where you've been and what you saw. Perhaps someday a less pandering bunch of filmmakers (and a bolder studio) will give Wells' classic the same head-on reading. Be patient; you'll have to wait a while.