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Guy Pearce wastes his time in The Time Machine |
Director: Simon Wells (Gore Verbinski)
Cast: Guy Pearce (Dr Alexander Hartdegen), Samantha Mumba
(Mara), Orlando Jones (Vox 114), Mark Addy (David Philby), Jeremy Irons (Über-Morlock),
Sienna Guillory (Emma), Phyllida Law (Mrs Watchit)
Every so often during this hysterical travesty of poor
film-making, it’s worth remembering that it was was directed by HG Wells
great-Grandson. If that’s not a reason for HG Wells to invent a time machine
and travel into the future, in order to give his descendant a slap, I don’t
know what is.
Anyway, with a plot vaguely reminiscent of some elements of
the original novel, but just as inspired by a strange mixture of Hollywood
blockbusters and Colin-Baker-era Doctor
Who, The Time Machine stars Guy
Pearce as Dr Alexander Hartdegen. In New York in 1899, Hartdegen is exactly the
sort of naïve, floppy haired, genius eccentric so beloved of Hollywood movies,
fascinated by time. When his fiancée Emma (Sienna Guillory) is killed in a
mugging gone-wrong, obsession to prevent this leads him to invent a time
machine – but he finds himself unable to prevent Emma’s death. Travelling
forward into the future to find out why he eventually finds himself 800,000
years in the future where the Earth is occupied by the peace-loving Eloi and
their brutal hunters, the subterranean Morlocks.
It’s hard to know where to begin with this film, but let’s
try. It’s very poorly written. The dialogue clunks to the ground in a way
reminiscent of the lumps of the moon that fall to the Earth in the future Hartdegen
sees. There is scarcely any logic in the events we see, from the mechanisms of
time travel to computers lasting hundreds of thousands of years with no
identifiable power source. Characters tend to do things because the plot needs
them to do it, rather than for any actual logical reason. Character development
occurs with a randomness: Hartdegen starts the film as a buck toothed, shaggy
haired “eccentric” and ends it as a ripped, action-hero haired heartthrob. No
idea how that progression is meant to work, but you certainly won’t find the
answer in the script.
It’s also poorly directed. Wells, working for the first (and
only) time with live action actors has no idea at all about how to set a film’s
tone or pace. The tone veers wildly from lowbrow comedy to highblown tension
from tragedy to farce. Scenes that are meant to pluck the heartstrings will
bring out tears of laughter. The actual comic bits will only bring out groans. Action
scenes late in the film are shot with a ham-fisted bluntness that reduces them
to laughable, cheesy crapness. Bright lights and wide angles frequently make a
film that cost over $100 million to make look like one that cost a tenth of
that. I will cut Simon Wells some slack, as he had to stand down from the
production meaning it’s final moments were put together by Hollywood Hack Gore
Verbinski, who probably just wanted to be out of there as soon as possible.
Also the whole design is so stupid. It’s a sort of
steam-punk cool, but with no logic applied. The time machine never moves from
its fixed geographical point, so it’s just as well no one tried to build a
house on it or that the moon collapse didn’t drop a pile of moon rock on top of
it. The time machine itself is a wonky contraption, full of spinning metal
things and odd surfaces but of course Hartgeden doesn’t even consider
installing a seat belt of any head protection. The Morlock design is equally
bad, bright lighting making them look more like the bastard spawn of the Orcs
from Lord of the Rings and Oscar the
Grouch from Seasame Street.
At the middle of it all you have the sort of bizarre cast
that could only have been assembled by some sort committee asking first “who’s
cool?” and second “who needs money?”. Cool is surely the only reason Samantha
Mumba (yes that Samantha Mumba) ended
up in this film, as a sexy Elio lady who might just make Hartgeden forget all about
that fiancée he’s spent four years obsessing about. At the other end, in one of
his finest performance of cash-grabbing ham, we have Jeremy Irons. I have to
admire his pluck, going through a laborious (Oscar-nominated!) make-up job
(albino with a brain growing down his back), but the sort of sub-Scar
speechifying the Über-Morlock delivers at the film’s climax (not to mention a
bizarrely wonky final fight scene) is the work of a man already mentally
spending the money on restoring his new castle in Ireland.
At the centre, Guy Pearce. I think at this time Pearce was
going through some sort of career crisis. He’s handsome enough to play rugged,
leading-man, action heroes like the type Hartgeden becomes. But in his heart,
he’s more at home playing weirdos, outsiders and oddball (witness the happiness
with which he embraces the buck-toothed oddness of early Hartgeden). So God
knows what he made of this, but you can sort of tell he thinks the whole thing
is crap, but doesn’t know what to do other than play it with a straight-jawed
commitment (he’d soon learn, as Irons has, to meet crap with ham).
Copper-bottomed crap at that, the sort of crap that would normally have you
running for the hills. So Pearce sort of gets his head down and just gets
through it and clearly hopes to still have a career when he comes out the other
side. Which I suppose is more than Samantha Mumba managed.
Events sort of happen at this film, which seems to have some
sort of confused message about moving on (“Your fiancée is dead? Man up and get
over it!”) and wants us to live a life of individualism even while Hartgeden
sets about giving the poor Eloi the sort of post-Victorian education that
eventually led to their ancestors cracking the moon in half and wrecking the
world. It’s the sort of film that ends things (literally) with a bang,
Hartgeden creating some sort of time bomb out of his time machine and then
running super-fast away (fortunately much faster than the allegedly super-fast
Morlocks. Also the shockwave decides to stop once it’s killed all the Morlocks
meaning Hartgeden is only guilty of mass genocide rather than wiping out the
world).
It’s all so far away from HG Wells cautionary tale of
scientific progress gone awry that you wonder if his grandson even read his
book. Did HG envision one day that a film would be made where a Morlock does a
head turn double take, like some sort of Seasame Street reject, a few seconds
before he blows up? That Jeremy Irons would pale up to play a character who
might as well be called Gruber-Morlock? That Sienna Guillory would be saved
from a mugger only to be hilariously killed off camera by a horse? That the
future would be the singer of Gotta Tell
Ya would repopulate the planet with a bored Australian actor? If HG did
make that time machine, we better tell him 2002 is a year to miss.
"Where would you go?" The poster asks. "To another film" replied the cinema audience.
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