The Time Machine (2002)

The Time Machine arrives with the solemn bearing of a picture that believes it is about Big Ideas: the mutability of fate, the cost of obsession, the grandfather paradox delivered with a straight face by Jeremy Irons in a great deal of prosthetic makeup. Simon Wells, directing his great-grandfather's novel with more reverence than clarity, moves the action from London to New York and ladles on a romantic subplot involving a fiancee who must die twice for the plot to function. The result is a handsomely mounted, faintly exhausting contraption, all brass fittings and swirling time-lapse photography, that treats its own philosophical questions the way a magician treats a volunteer from the audience: briefly, and with a tendency to make them disappear.

The film's social consciousness is incidental at best. The future Eloi are a conspicuously multiracial tribe, and Orlando Jones appears as a holographic librarian, but nobody in the screenplay pauses to remark upon it, which is to the picture's credit. The closest the film comes to a thesis about the economic order is Alex's mild preference for pure research over the business world, a preference expressed once and then abandoned for ape-suited monsters. There is no systematic indictment of capital here, no sermon about the climate, no lecture about history's forgotten. The Morlocks eat people because they are hungry, not because the screenplay has a point to make about it.

Instead we get a chase through a collapsing cave and a moral about letting go, delivered with the subtlety of a falling anvil. Guy Pearce has since disowned the film. Samantha Mumba does what the role asks. The makeup team earned an Academy Award nomination and the picture opened at number one, proving that nostalgia and brass goggles can carry a great deal of narrative dead weight. As cultural documents go, this one is nearly inert, a handsome antique that says nothing and means it.