Guy Pearce ("Memento," "Priscilla: Queen of the Desert") plays Alexander Hartdegen, a brilliant but eccentric scientist surrounded by dinosaurs in identical bowler caps. In addition to giving the time traveler a name, this new screenplay by John Logan ("Gladiator") also gives him a fiancée, Emma, sweetly portrayed by Sienna Guillory.
In a radical departure from the novel, we see Hartdegen's fiancée die just after his proposal, in a preposterous tussle with a mugger over her moonstone engagement ring. This tragedy fuels his desperation to create a time machine, so he can go back and save his beloved. After a mere four years, he achieves his goal and returns to the evening of her death, only to have her die again, this time trampled by horses.
Six hours later, he has an epiphany while talking to his faithful friend David Philby (Mark Addy, "The Full Monty.") "I could come back a thousand times, watch her die a thousand ways ... I can't find the answer here. Not here, not now."
Thus begins his journey into the future. This seems a rather long and incredulous setup, which serves rather to distract and detract rather than add to the overall effect.
Pearce plays his part satisfactorily, but the script does not give him enough to work with for him to be fully convincing. Sappy and clichéd throughout, the movie milks its few charms for all they are worth.
One such charm is the time machine itself, which is absolutely beautiful. Ten feet, six inches tall and weighing over 6,000 pounds, the machine is a marvel of modern technology. The special effects supervisor, Matt Sweeney, deserves much praise for the perfect synchronicity of the machines' movements (digitally augmented) and the fascinating portrayal of the passage of time at various scenes throughout the movie. In one scene, we see women's fashions evolve over 130 years (a throwback to the 1960 version) and in another, we see the world reborn over the course of 8,000 centuries.
Another bonus is Vox (Orlando Jones, "Evolution"), the photonic compendium of all human knowledge whom Hartdegen meets in the New York Public Library in 2030. Vox provides the only laughs in the film and his emotional expression as an artificial personality far surpasses any of the human characters in the film.
The distant descendants of humankind, Mara and Kalen (Samantha and Omero Mumba), are adequately likable but, once again, the script fails to believably establish their characters and motivations; the sudden affinity which Hartdegen develops for them is something of a non sequitur. Also, the attempt to create a romantic possibility between Hartdegen and Mara is utterly pathetic.
There were a number of interesting ideas and themes, but none of them were well developed. Whereas the script practically beat us over the head with the more hackneyed themes (technology as a plague, non-conformity, the personal and the human over the abstract) the subtler and more engaging themes that were the focus of H.G. Wells' novel (Darwinism and social oppression) were almost ignored. Jeremy Irons' all too brief performance at the end of the film was saddled with the responsibility of driving these themes home and one cannot help but feel vaguely sorry for his failure.
I feel confident that this movie could have been brilliant with better writing and about an hour-and-a-half more film. Of course, one cannot help but wonder if such an enterprise would be worth the investment (either in the making or the viewing) to adapt a story like this, however engaging, in a world that seems to be all but past this sort of speculation.