The Time Machine | Review

Great grandson reduces classic to drivel.

Have you ever pondered with the thought of what you would do if you’d be able to go back in time? In my case, I wouldn’t bother with any major exploits- I’d just go back one day into the past and collect all the baseball scores and then hit Vegas. Time travel is one of the many staples in the sci-fi genre and coincidently is the basis for the newest Simon Wells’ first big Hollywood production, maybe someone should have told junior to leave his great grandpa Wells’ classic novel alone.

The Time Machine is categorically a big studio nightmare- big budget production with a storyline that would interest a demographic of a ten year old. Okay, since this is after all a sci-fi flick- there is a certain suspension of beliefs that are allowed to occur-they are imposed on and accepted by the audience, so when the Moon explodes to bits and the time travels take our adventurer to landscapes that resemble Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or to a time that feels like a cross between Planet of the Apes meets Mad Max beyond Thunderdoom inside an Ewok village-we believe in it. But the gibberish non-sense that trails the entire storyline asks a little too much from its viewers, it asks us to suspend our beliefs in what a film is required to have, which is a logical, rational baseline narrative. Initially, “the wandering idiot” spends all of his time on trying to change the fate of his finance, and then with a drop of a dime he ends up saving the world all because he pressed the wrong buttons on his big windmill of a machine. His new career choice seems to miraculously make our protagonist amnesia-like, he seems totally unfazed by his new predicament- a trip eight hundred thousand years A.D into the future. All hell breaks loose when his new female companion announces that he must take the child away before the …..bam! a colony of ticked off creatures who are hungry for some human affection, and organs come into the picture.

The real atrocity is the blasphemous character dialogue, which is more suitable for a cheesy B-film picture than for a big studio picture-, and believe it or not it gets worse when the time traveler encounters a human species that seem like a bunch of Jodie Foster Nell characters, it is also turn off that a civilization that far into the future can look more like Tarzan’s children than a Terminator offspring. There are some cool set designs to the film, perhaps better suited for the next survivor series on the tele. Orlando Jones (Evolution) and liquid paper white Jeremy Irons (Kafka) do very little to support the very forgettable performance of our Memento star Guy Pierce. The Time Machine is one the year’s most silliest entries and this, unfortunately a 90 minutes that you won’t be able to go back in time to retrieve.

Rating 0.5 stars