creationstems I give this film a 10/10 for personal reasons, though I think an average score of 5.9/10 is an awful joke. It goes to show the mainstream are as often wrong as they are right. The Time Machine has everything I love in a movie: existentialism, loss, abstract symbolism and reflection, mystical fantasy of the serious kind, bold adventure and traveling to the far-far reaches of the future, a beautiful and passionate main character, a powerful lesson learned in the end, and easily one of the best soundtracks I have ever heard. Listen to halfway through Stone Language. This movie itself is up there with Mulholland Dr.

generationofswine I don't know how to approach this one."The Time Machine" is one of those stories that, rereading it, beings back vivid memories. One of my best friends in high school loaned it to me, I stored it away in my backpack for about a month and then...when we had a field trip to The Board of Trade, I scrounged it out and read it on the train ride.It was one of those stories that is so short I could rip through it in the hour and fifteen minutes between our small town and Chicago. To this day, every time I go back to it, it brings me back to 1997 and, to this day, I distinctly remember finishing it about the time the train stopped and I remember walking into the crowded city feeling like I was in a different world. The story had moved me out of reality so much Chicago seemed jarring.And then they made it into a movie, a remake of a movie and, watching it, I don't know, I didn't have that same sense of being in a totally different world that the book gave me...And the movie, in my mind, has to live up to that experience in some small way. Or at least give you that feeling that same feeling that the world was still spinning that one gets when they walk out of a movie and discover that it had rained.It's an engrossing story and The Time Machine didn't seem to whisk me away like the book did. I can't help but feel it deserved better.It felt like I was watching a movie and, honestly, it gave me the same since that Jackson's King Kong did, it felt like it was trying and horribly, miserably failed.I left feeling "meh," and that was after being excited walking into it, I mean, I read it in 1997 and they made a movie in 2002 and, I was expecting the same feeling. I had waited long enough.So, I don't know, I may be overly harsh on it just because I loved what the story did to me so much, the first time I read it and now, as an adult, it doesn't take me to another world, it takes me back to 1997 again, and high school, and that hour fifteen minute train ride to Chicago.So ultimately, it could be a halfway decent film that I just hate because the story had such a jarring effect on me when I first encountered it.

Eric Stevenson I was interesting in seeing this movie if only because my brother likes it so much. I even went so far as to see it with him and he wanted the volume up and everything else. I had heard pretty bad things about this movie and wasn't expecting something great. After watching the film, my brother basically said that he realized it didn't hold up. That's nostalgia for you. I guess if I read the book version or seen the original movie, I would have liked it. There are definitely good scenes in this movie, but it just comes off as way too silly. It tells the story about this guy who travels back in time to save his girlfriend's life, but she dies anyway.He then comes to accept that he can't save her, but then travels into the future to find out why he can't. Then he accidentally travels much further where people live in tribes and there are these giant noseless hairy people who hunt after them. The worst part is that half of the movie takes place in this time. I wanted to see more of a futuristic setting. It was just silly with how these guys look. Their leader is some white and blue guy who looks nothing like them. This film was just too silly for me to take seriously, but I do like the scenes where the main character accepts his fate. Time travel fiction can do much better. **

GusF The original version is my seventh favourite film of all time. While this film is nowhere near as good as its predecessor, it is also nowhere near as bad as it is made out to be. It rollicks along at a great pace and is enormous fun from start to finish. The film is well directed by H.G. Wells' great-grandson Simon Wells and Gore Verbinski, who replaced him for the last 18 days of the shoot as he was suffering from exhaustion. I don't know who directed what scenes so I can't really get specific in my critique but I will say that the direction seemed perfectly consistent. When it comes to the writing, there are a few plot holes but none of them impacted on my enjoyment of the film.Guy Pearce is a very good lead as the time traveller Alexander Hartdegen, even if the character's journey from an eccentric professor to an action hero over the course of a few days - relatively speaking - is a little hard to believe. Samantha Mumba is very natural as his Eloi love interest Mara. One thing that she does very well is deliver the Eloi dialogue as if it were an actual language. The same is true of her real life younger brother Omero as Kalen. He is quite good in the role but, perhaps unsurprisingly, he is at his best in his scenes with his sister. Their chemistry comes through very clearly, particularly in the scene when she comforts him after his nightmare. Jeremy Irons is suitably creepy in his cameo as the Über-Morlock and the film has three strong supporting actors in Mark Addy, Orlando Jones and Phyllida Law. Sienna Guillory is the weakest link but she has only a small role so that's okay. I loved Alan Young's "blink and you'll miss it" appearance as the florist! I have actually met both Irons and Samantha Mumba and they're both very nice.When it comes to the Eloi and the Morlocks, the film largely lacks the novel and the 1960 film's social commentary but the fact that none of the Eloi are white may have been intended as a commentary on the way that ethnic minorities are and were mistreated, as in the "Planet of the Apes" films. The first of those is referenced to the Morlocks' hunting of the Eloi. Speaking of which, I loved the design of the Spy Morlocks but I wasn't too gone on that of the Hunter Morlocks. The Über-Morlock's was very good except for his brain stretching down his back, which I thought was a bit silly. The time machine itself is a beautiful design but you can't beat the 1960 version. The CGI was very impressive for its time and the time travel effects are one of the highlights of the film. There are some lovely references to the original film, my favourite being the Über-Morlock aging rapidly and eventually crumbling to dust when outside the machine's temporal bubble. Not sure what the point of relocating the action to New York was though, especially since Jones is the only major American cast member. Incidentally, Alexander's first future pit-stop is May 24, 2030, which will be my 43rd birthday! Overall, the film is a very enjoyable film which is very good as remakes go. I wish that "Planet of the Apes" (2001), a remake of my sixth favourite film of all time, or "Star Trek: Nemesis", another 2002 film written by John Logan, were as much fun as this.