The Time Machine

THE TIME MACHINE is a science fiction romance featuring Guy Pearce as the college professor and Samantha Mumba as the love interest. Ms.Mumba lives in the distant future, and resides in a primitive vertical village built into the steep sides of a canyon. The movie features plenty of gee-whiz gizmos. These gizmos will be the delight, especially to children between the ages of eight to fourteen. The opening sequence of the movie takes place in a college and in the professor's laboratory, and the viewer is treated to plenty of gizmos, including an early version of the electric toothbrush. Then, we see the time machine, with its brass fittings and whirling crystalline components. And then, in the distant future, the viewer is treated to a melange of shelters, ladders, windmills, and other devices, all of wood and natural fibers, which belong to the primitive civilization of the Eloi people.In my opinion, the first third of the film is the best part. Mr.Pearce is courting actress Sienna Guillory, in the spare moments that somehow seem to be left free from his busy schedule of teaching and research. The turn-of-the-century society, as shown in the first third of the film, is one of turn-of-the-century prudishness. In one scene, Ms.Guillory is shocked (but happily so) when Mr.Pearce kisses her in public. While at an evening ice skating date, Mr. Pearce presents Ms.Guillory with an engagement ring. Ms.Guillory is not only beautiful, but her lips and cheeks quivver in a fascinating and fetching manner, in response to Mr.Pearce's interest in marriage. Any viewer of this display of little twitches and quivverings of pleasure, will be convinced that such is the stuff of movie actors (and not within the achievable realm of any ordinary amateur actor).At any rate, the viewer's exposure to Ms.Gullory is cut short by a street thug, who slays her by the ice skating pond. Mr.Pearce responds with an expressions of shock and agony. Again, such expressions are within the capabilities of an rare and occasional trained actor, and not within the realm of amateur actors. In response, Mr.Pearce devotes himself to building a time machine, with the goal of traveling back to the past to change what happened. He succeeds, in part, because he is able to meet Ms.Guillory shortly before her demise, and he succeeds further, by convincing her to travel away from the ice skating pond. But alas, she is run over in an accident with a horse-drawn carriage.The film shifts gears, and Mr.Pearce decides to travel forwards in time for an answer, where his goal is still to save Ms.Guillory. What thus occurs is, at least in my opinion, one of the finest sequences in film history. The earlier film from 1960 contains an equivalent sequence, but it is clumsy and clunky compared to this sequence in the Guy Pearce movie. At any rate, the viewer is treated to a particular, static location (Mr. Pearce's laboratory) but where time races forwards by many years. We see a view of the women's shop across the street from the laboratory, where the style of the fashions displayed in the front window is updated every few seconds, where the hemlines rise ever higher. We see a bird's eye view of the laboratory, where small structures are replaced by skyscrapers. Eventually, Mr.Pearce halts his time travel, and finds himself in a modern society where the mining taking place on the moon resulted in an accident where the moon got partially shattered, and is missing a few chunks.This moon scene is one of the cleverest in the history of cinema, in my opinion. An engaging part of this movie, is when Mr.Pearce meets an ordinary young woman with her bicycle. The woman glances at the time machine, parked in an alleyway, and she makes the comment that it looks like a cappuccino machine. (I like cappuccinos and, to my knowledge, this is one of the few existing jokes about cappuccinos. To digress a bit, it might be noted that Gary Larson has a cartoon about lattes, where a cowboy says, "Latte, Jed?") Then, Mr.Pearce leaves the bicycle woman, and continues traveling in time. The viewer is treated to scenes where thousands of years are compressed into a minute, and we see erosion and canyons being formed with the passage of time. Mr.Pearce eventually halts in the far, distant future (the year 802,701 A.D.), where he makes an acquaintance with the Eloi people and the lovely Samantha Mumba. There are many engaging and charming episodes in this part of the movie, when Mr.Pearce gets to know the Eloi people, and where he wins their trust.Much of the rest of the movie concerns the Morlocks and their evil leader, Jeremy Irons. While I did not particularly care for the part of the movie featuring the Morlocks, nothing can be done about this, since they are an integral part of the original TIME MACHINE novel. At any rate, the Morlocks are scary and they jump around like grasshoppers and they chase people, and eventually they eat people (but this eating is not shown). Then, Mr.Pearce hikes down into cave and eventually confronts Mr.Irons. To me, this part of the movie was really stupid. First of all, Mr.Irons just looks like himself but with tons of white makeup. Aside from the gobs of white makeup, there was no attempt to change his morphology from that of a regular human being. To conclude, I enjoy watching the first hour of the movie, periodically, perhaps once a year. The first hour of the movie is a clever, heart-tugging, science fiction romance.

Great DVD

One of my favorite movies. Dvd worked well, no issues.

The Time Machine, 2002, is called a remake. I assume people think of it as a remake of the 1960 version. There is, as many of you know, the BOOK that started it all. In my review I will compare the 2002 movie to both of these. I have not had the pleasure of watching the TV movie, or movies, so I can't use those in my reviews. There will be spoilers.The movie, as pointed out, came out in 2002, and the DVD around 2003. The special effects are mostly computer generated and don't come out too well on the TV screen - at least not mine. The movie, as you can guess, is heavy in computer generated effects. The problem is, we have seen it all before. Time travel allows us to see the landscape change, buildings fall into ruins, and organic material rot. We have seen it before and, in some cases, better than this in other science fiction movies and PBS specials.The plot starts out with more substance then the book or 1960 movie. The Time Traveler is motivated to change the past. In fact he works four years on it, doing nothing else and, in fact, going a tad insane with his need to travel back in time. Why he needs to I will leave unsaid so not to spoil it but it does differ from the book and 1960 movie. In the book he wants to travel to the future because he wants to. He is looking for adventure. In the 1960 movie he is sick of humankind and hopes the future is better.In other words, the 2002 does add more meat to the plot. But is that helpful? It does slow it down yet character building always does.He tries to change the past once the machine is finished but fails. The Traveler comes to understand that changing the past is, maybe not impossible, at least beyond his skills and he decides to go FORWARD in time to find somebody who can help him. Why he thinks future humans would help him CHANGE his past, and therefore their past, is not a logical flaw as much as it shows how much stress and pressure he is in to carry out his mission. He has become cold, self-centered, out of touch with the world - it is not bad acting.NOW here comes why I did not give the movie five stars. The rest of the film becomes a mess of bad science, bad story telling, and just bad...bad. And here be spoilers.First, we do meet a cool Library Computer, which is really nothing more than what we MAY have later in the 21 Century. Not only that but the future looks clean, everybody is healthful, and we have people on the Moon. But then...well, it all goes wrong.First, the Moon is destroyed. Which seems to happen a lot in sci-fi. While the film makes it clear it is our fault, it does not make it clear just how. We know there was a colony on the Moon and we know that we were using it for other reasons, but what happened? Details people.The Time Traveler moves forward again, finding humans have recovered, in which we all look alike, live in homes on the side of cliffs, and use natural resources to survive. These people are the Eloi. Oh, has he found paradise? No. Because the human race has split off into two groups. The Morlocks, creatures who live underground live off the Eloi. In more ways than one. This is explained to him by the LIBRARY COMPUTER which has somehow lasted thousands of years. Poor thing. But the Time Traveler decides he has to change things - or at least save the hot chick he was growing interested in. So he invades the Morlocks' underground city. And is of course captured.Here the Time Traveler finds out that the reason he can not change the past is because to do so means he would never design or build a Time Machine. So he can NEVER change the past. Which is funny, because after zipping forward to see the world ruled by the Morlocks, he comes back and changes the past. But maybe because it was not HIS past but changing his FUTURE, he could get away with it.The end result is a feeling that the story got derailed halfway through the movie. Or maybe the writers got lazy. The Time Traveling Scientist becomes a fist-swinging Hero. The quest to understand time and the nature of it gets pushed to one side as it becomes a simple fight between Good and Evil. In the book it was evolution that had made two different races, one the cattle, one the butchers. The 1960 movie tried to stay close to that, adding World Wars to help it along so that the Eloi come out as idiot children and the Morlocks are whip carrying meat eaters. The Morlocks came out as the bad guys but you did not think of them as EVIL, with a big E. Maybe evil with a letter e, like an illness or a hose fire. But this movie needs to make the Morlocks EVIL, to the point of giving them a voice in a super-Morlock. Because the Time Traveler, spoiler, spoiler, spoiler, uses his Time Machine to kill them all. Or at least the Morlocks in this underground city.The end result, plus the extras, mean that this gets a solid four. The movie, by itself, would have gotten a three.

Llegó bien. El bluray tiene audio inglés y francés con subtítulos inglés y francés, como lo indica la foto del vendedor, sin embargo en la descripción o detalles del producto del vendedor o Amazon dice doblado al español pero no es cierto, igual excelente película, recomendado.

A fantastic story brought to film in a marvelous fashion. Did they take some liberties with the story from the book? Of course, but it's fine. If you know the story, or you don't, either way you'll enjoy this movie.

This Sci-Fi had a big influence on me as a growing teen when it released, it just stuck with me, I love it, too bad there isn’t a 4k.