| THE TIME MACHINE |
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2002 - USA Director:
Simon Wells, Gore Verbinski |
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TIM: It seems that the motivation for a lot of inventors is the love of a woman combined with eternal regret. In Alexander's case, it is Emma (Sienna Guillory), his lovely girlfriend. (Again, here's a case of the pretty people meeting and falling in love... Ick!) On what should've been the happiest night of their lives, Emma, in perfect Hollywood fashion, is killed. Flash forward something like four years and we find that Alexander has indeed been motivated by the love a woman and his drive to change history. Upon getting his machine in working order, he finds that going back in time doesn't save Emma, but perhaps he may be able to find the true answer in the future. LINDA: He takes a couple skips into the future, one into 2030, where he takes a harrowing journey to... the library! There he meets the one redeeming quality of the film, a hologram-ish librarian named Vox (Orlando Jones) who stores "all the knowledge of mankind" in his 2-D head. Lucky for the audience, Vox appears again later in the film, providing, ironically, the only breath of "life" in the movie. Anyways, after seeing New York get destroyed by the moon collapsing dramatically on his next time hop, Alex gets knocked unconscious, falls on the all-important control of his time machine, a lever that looks suspiciously like my grandparents' glass bathroom door knob (nice touch!), and ends up some 800,000 years in the future. TIM: This is where there are some pretty impressive special effects. Of course, Alexander is unconscious through most of his 800,000 year journey, but we get to see the world go through the ages. From a world of lunar devastation to green fields of healing to the next ice age and back to a more primal way of life. Where he ends up is a land where people have really toned bodies and seem to have rediscovered the joy of loin cloths and see-through linen pants. This new civilization speaks in a strange tongue but almost immediately recognize English as the "stone" language. It is nice to know that, even through global destruction, English will live on. His conversation partner in this new word is Mara (Samantha Mumba), a teacher, who seems to be in a power-position in the village, tribe, or whatever they are... LINDA: I have to say that these people had the dorkiest fake language that I've ever heard. "Quin banana quin?" translates as "Ready to go to bed?" Or maybe it was actually, "Quin banana Samantha Mumba quin?" which would roughly mean, "Alex, do you want to go to bed with me after the credits roll?" Of course he does. TIM: Mmmmm... bananas. Does anyone have any ice cream? We could make a split! LINDA: If anyone needed a banana split, it was Guy Pearce! His face was so gaunt, it was almost skeletal! Give the man some cake and pie! A least the hair-care products of the far future were good for him, as his once-greasy mane got progressively fuller and more manageable. TIM: Anyway... As the pair are on one of their extremely picturesque walks or canoe rides through Eden, heading back to join up with the rest of the good looking, athletic and tattooed mumble-jumble speaking people, a sense of urgency comes over Mara. What follows is a rather disturbing introduction to the race of Morlocks, an underground, Lord of the Rings ork-like creature. They spring up from under the sand and start blow-darting people, then drag them, kicking and screaming, back down through the sand. Again, in perfect Hollywood fashion, Mara is one of the unlucky who is sucked down to middle earth. (Face it, the women in this movie don't stand a chance!) LINDA: The last act of the film really didn't make any sense. I think the filmmakers tried to sneak one by us, defying all logic by just wrapping things up really fast with lots of splashy special effects.TIM: As it turns out, the one actor that I really wanted to see (Jeremy Irons) had but one scene and even then, the Uber-Morlock seemed like a recycled character from another sci-fi type movie. LINDA: I had to suppress giggles when poor Jeremy came on screen. He looked like David Bowie from Labyrinth, but with all his pigment drained away from being underground so long, leaving him with white skin and hair, and twitching black lips. Heh heh heh. Wait... was that his brain on his back? TIM: I'd say that the first 45 minutes were the best. Although the special effects were good and the digital landscape was quite impressive, there was one very obvious standing-in-front-of-a-green-screen shot that didn't seem to match up to the quality of the rest of it. It may have a good run at the box office because of the incredible hype that it has gotten, and I have to admit, I was going to see it whether I wanted to or not—but was left thinking "Whooza?" and "But, but what about..." or even "Why, I oughtta..." Even though it fell short, if you're going to see it, see it on the big screen. A rental is going to cost you as much as a Saturday afternoon matinee and you'll get to, at least, see the effects in a bigger-than-life kinda way. |
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Linda's
Rating
Tim's
Rating
LINDA: Well, the movie doesn't start out bad. We meet Alexander (Guy Pearce), a disheveled, absent-minded professorial-type at the turn of the 20th century in... what... New York? The actors had a range of accents (I believe most of them were Brits or Aussies), and it took me a while to realize they were "speaking American." Oh. This part of the film certainly
looked great, especially a long shot of a busy snowy boulevard at night, filled with the headlamps of carriages.
