Almost three years to the day before Doctor Who got its big revival series starring Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, DreamWorks Pictures released an ambitious science-fiction movie that pre-empted a major time-travel concept from the show. It wasn’t until 2008’s “The Fires of Pompeii,” when the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) took Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) to witness the fall of Pompeii, that the show crystallized one of its most important cosmic principles. The Doctor and his companions alter history countless times throughout the series, yet “fixed points in time” are events that must always happen. If they don’t, reality itself could rip apart.
In Doctor Who, the future often becomes set in stone once a time traveler has perceived it; We see as much in “The Angels Take Manhattan,” where The Doctor warns Amy and Rory not to read ahead in a book chronicling their own futures because, once they know what’s coming, history becomes nearly impossible to change. But some events are fixed even before they are observed, and history will rearrange the circumstances to preserve the same essential outcome.
These overlapping principles hint at the exact reason why time-travel stories remain so fascinating as a form of wish fulfillment. Is it possible to change the past? Either to make the future better or to prevent the worst things from happening altogether? That’s the moral center of 2002’s The Time Machine, a criminally underrated adaptation of H. G. Wells’ 1895 novella of the same name. Since the movie just landed on Pluto TV, it’s worth revisiting for a free streaming session.
“Adaptation” is kind of a loose term here, since the movie takes a lot of liberties with the story. In the original, the protagonist is a nameless observer wandering through time primarily out of scientific curiosity, testing theories, and eventually reaching the death of all living things on Earth more than 30 million years into the future before traveling back to his own dinner party to brag about it. The movie eschews that sort of pomp and circumstance to attempt at a more grounded tale. The script is written by John Logan, who also penned Hugo, Skyfall, The Aviator, and Gladiator. Its greatest strength is that it infuses Wells’ seminal story with emotional purpose.
Dr. Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pierce) is an inventor and college professor at Columbia University in 1899 New York City (a not-so-significant deviation from the original novella’s Victorian setting). Pierce delivers a very convincing performance as a handsome and charming mad scientist type who’d rather focus on research, but academia is really his only option. After a mugger kills his fiancée, a distraught Hartdegen builds a time machine to save her. He’s successful, but then as we see him buy her a bundle of roses, a rogue horse cart crashes into her in the background.
“I can come back a thousand times, see her die a thousand ways,” Hartdegen murmurs soon after, ultimately realizing that much like how Mount Vesuvius destroying Pompeii is a fixed point in time for Doctor Who, Emma’s death cannot be undone. Some things must happen.
Rather than traveling into the future out of mere curiosity, like the literary character he’s based on, Hartdegen instead goes looking for answers in the future and instead discovers a renewed sense of purpose.
One of the great visual appeals of The Time Machine is how director Simon Wells (the great-grandson of author H. G. Wells, fittingly enough) presents the time travel itself. Unlike The Doctor’s TARDIS, this time machine is fixed in space. As it travels, we see the space around the machine change rapidly as a time-lapse. But we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of years here, so it’s a breathtaking and breezy barrage of visuals as buildings fall and are rebuilt ever-higher. We witness a dystopian apocalypse evolve into something of a utopian paradise in the blink of an eye.
About 45 minutes into the movie, Hartdegen arrives in the year 802,701, where humanity has split into two species: the peaceful Eloi, mostly normal-looking humans who live above ground in apparent harmony, and the monstrous Morlocks, who emerge from beneath the Earth to hunt them. It’s here where The Time Machine shifts gears from existential science fiction into something resembling a pulp adventure that lasts a bit more than 70 minutes. There are daring rescues, underground chases, and Jeremy Irons chewing the scenery as the terrifying telepathic Über-Morlock with bleach-white skin who controls the other Morlocks. Both he and the regular Morlocks are pretty frightening.
That tonal pivot doesn’t entirely work — and it’s the main reason why The Time Machine was received rather poorly upon its release. Once Hartdegen accepts that Emma’s death is an immutable part of history, the movie’s central emotional conflict is already resolved. The action-heavy bulk of the movie lacks the same philosophical weight as everything that came before it. Yet the Morlocks still serve an important purpose. They force Hartdegen to stop obsessing over the life he couldn’t save and instead fight for the strange new future still in front of him. That resonates on some level, but The Time Machine doesn’t really earn that ending.
Even if Simon Wells built a time machine and went back to try and fix what went wrong with The Time Machine, he wouldn’t be able to. You’ve got a young Guy Pierce who really sells both the genius and the scrappy badassery of this character. You can’t let that go to waste. 24 years later, The Time Machine remains a deeply imperfect movie, but that central idea — that time travel isn’t the godly power science fiction often portrays it as — has only grown more compelling in the years since. That’s reason enough to give this overlooked adaptation another chance.
