The Time Machine(1960)
It's the end
of the nineteenth century in England and George Mills is busy
inventing time machines. For guys who still died of typhoid and
the clap, they sure spent a lot of time developing way cool inventions that we
still can't recreate (remember the earth borer in At The Earth's Core?).
That's okay in this case, because The Time Machine is one of those science fiction shockers that actually has ideas and manages
to execute them in an entertaining fashion. The movie also benefits from a
strong performance by Rod Taylor, who is able to come across as a decent guy
that wants to make the world a better place, but isn't above setting a few
Morlocks on fire to get his point across.
If Rod looks familiar to you, it's
because a few years after battling the Morlocks, he was battling a pack of
crabby birds with Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock's The Birds. As good as he was in both movies, it's kind of odd that he didn't go on and
do more. Wait a minute, what am I saying? He later guest starred on several
episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger. Why, I knew a guy who loved that show!
Things kick off at a dinner party with some of George's buddies. That's
typically British - where I'm from (Gary, Indiana), we start if off with
some BBQ, brews, and wait for my cousin to show up and try to pick a fight with
the biggest guy there. Do groups of men still have dinner parties? Since
they're British, I'm guessing that they probably discuss whether they were
going to have crumpets during
their tea parties.
These friends of George's are an impatient lot and
everyone keeps wondering where George went to, since he's late for his own
dinner party (maybe he actually met a girl or something - they should just
settle back and watch the Star Trek: The Next Generation marathon on TNN until he gets back). George finally stumbles into the room,
his clothes all dirty and ripped and generally looking like he just got back
from a soccer game against Manchester United. Everyone wonders what happened
to him, but you know that secretly they're outraged that their crumpets are
getting cold. 
George tells them that they might not believe him, but that he
just got back from saving the world 800,000 years in the future. You know, I'm
a good friend. If one of my buddies came back saying that, I'd be, "hey man,
way to be, now can you pass me some chips and do you have anymore Keystones
on ice." But these British guys are obviously fair weather friends and kind of
snicker about it and I'm thinking that they should shut up if they ever want to
eat their fish and chips because now that they've called George out, he's going
to spend all of dinner recounting his two fisted tale of adventure, time
travel, horror, love found, love lost, and then whip out his souvenir flower to
seal the deal.
Well, before these dopes can get so much as a spot of porridge,
George is taking us all on a little time travelling trip of our own, all the
way back to five days ago. It's the last day of 1899 and instead of getting
totally annihilated on Budweiser Ale or whatever they drank back then and
worrying about whether the Y1.9K bug was going to cause his horse to poop
everywhere, he's having these same people over to his house and demonstrating
his invention: a miniature time machine.
This thing is about the size of one
of those snap together model cars us dumb kids would get since we didn't have
the dexterity to do glue together models (my old man may not have been much of
anything in his life, but he could build the best model airplanes you ever saw
and I'd be glad to stand up and say that at his funeral).
I was thinking that
we should test this model time machine out by putting a cute little hamster in
it or maybe that irritating Stuart Little, set the thing for one million B.C.
and sayonara you dumb little rat! George squanders this opportunity and
instead transports a cigar into the future or past. That sounds like a good
movie: The Stogie From Beyond Time!
After he makes it disappear, his friends are amazed but not convinced that
there has been any time travel. They all leave and his good friend Filby makes
George promise that he won't go and get any himself involved in any time-space
distortions. He swears that he won't go out of the room. Then he goes to
where he's been storing the time machine and it kind of looks like a souped up
version of Santa's sled.
They should have played this scene like Robert Duvall did in Days Of Thunder. You remember when right before the big race and Robert was worried about Tom
Cruise and whether he still had the heart to win it all after his big car wreck
earlier in the picture. Duvall is telling the car that Cole (Cruise and yes I
am giggling as I write that) is still a little bit scared and that she (the
car) is going to have to take care of him and that Cole might try and drive her
too hard and that she is going to have make sure he doesn't blow her cams or
something. I always thought that that car should have been nominated for a
supporting actress Oscar.
Well, The Time Machine is a great movie, but it's no Days Of Thunder, so there wasn't any pep talk, but I did notice something that
was just as great. On the time machine's control panel consisting of a lever
and an odometer that listed dates instead of speeds was a nifty little brass
plate affixed to the center of it. Engraved in fancy cursive was the phrase
"Manufactured by George Mills" or some such nonsense. Have you ever heard of a
mad scientist putting a label on his gizmo before? How very British of George
to do that!
He gets in and fires up the time machine, but he doesn't do it
like any real man would. Any other guy would get in and immediately pull the
lever all the way forward or all the back, instantly transporting themselves to
the very beginning or end of time. No guy is going to get in there and just
sit there watching the flowers in their lab bloom and un-bloom while the sun and
moon fly by over head. We'd get in there and see what this baby can do!
George on the other hand is content to sort of putter along watching weeks and
finally years go by all the while marvelling at the mannequin across the street
and how the fashions it displays change over the years. I was amazed that a
department store would be so dull it would have the same mannequin and window
display for sixty years. Isn't that why Woolworth's went under?
Grandma George finally kicks it out of first
gear and the next thing we know, he's wrecking his time machine in the year
800,000 give or take several centuries. Everything he recognizes is gone,
replaced by wilderness. He wanders around and locates some people by a river.
They, like most futuristic types are all young, blonde and dressed in pastel
colored togas. Yes, this is one of those sci-fi movies that thinks being
evolved means dressing up like you were Aristotle and hanging around in the
woods.
George notices that one of these future saps is trying to drown in the
river. No one around helps her out so George takes off his jacket and dives in
and saves her. He tries to lay a guilt trip on everyone for not trying to save
her, but even the girl he rescued isn't too put out about it. I would have
just thrown her ungrateful ass back in, put the time machine into fifth gear
and gone on to an era more appreciative of my super heroics, but George is
determined to learn about these people.
He tries to get information out of
them, but no one has anything to say. Soon it becomes clear to George that
these people are all fairly retarded (they've let all their books turn to dust
for heaven's sake!), but since the girl he rescued is a good looking blonde he
decides that these people just need to have someone British like him to
rekindle that spark in them that would make them solid British citizens and do
stuff like save drowning women, read books, and be polite at dinners instead of
being the American dogs they so obviously are.
These people are called the
Eloi and they don't do anything but lay around and periodically get harassed by
an underground race of slugs called the Morlocks. There is some connection to
these people that is so heinous it's virtually unspeakable except to say that
the Morlocks heard these dumb blondes around and use them as food.
George
learns that during the last great war, the survivors split into two groups, the
dumb blondes and the man-eating subhuman freaks. You can practically see
George licking his chops when he hears this - he's been looking for something
concrete to do to show these blondes how to be men again. Plus he needs to
kill some time since the Morlocks car jacked his time machine and hid it in
some temple he can't get into. Do I even need to go into how something like
the Club should probably be standard issue on a rig as sweet as a time machine?
Once George's girlfriend gets captured by the Morlocks, George climbs down into the Morlocks' crib, lights up a torch and opens up a
can Victorian whoop-ass (manufactured by George Mills) on those cave scum. The
Morlocks are pretty cool as monsters go. They have this blue skin, long
stringy white hair and their eyes light up which is a nice effect in the dark
caves. Since they live underground they can't stand light and even more
importantly they don't like to be set on fire.
George single-handedly holds off
all the Morlocks until one of them almost gets the better of him when one of
the blondes remembers how to make a fist and proceeds to thump the Morlock on
the back of his head. Finally, George Mills has brought warfare back to the
Eloi! Instantly transforming the Eloi into a well oiled fighting machine,
George leads all of them back to safety and they blow up the Morlock's
underground house.
George gets back his time machine, but before Weena can
decide whether to come with him, the doors of the temple close and George goes
back by himself. After telling his story to his disbelieving friends, there is
a nice ending where George disappears with his time machine again, taking only
three books with him to rebuild society, leaving the viewer to ponder what
books he took (I would have taken the next three weeks of US Weekly myself).
There are nice touches
throughout the movie about the significance of time travel such as when he
meets up with the son of his friend Filby at different times. When he finds
out that Filby is long since dead, it drives home the point that maybe we
should be content living in the time we have before us, enjoying the now, for
the future inevitably will take all we care about from us, leaving us only
bittersweet memories before taking us as well. George sometimes talks about
how he wants to go back and tell everyone what he's discovered about the
future. But will he tell them everything? Will he tell Filby that he is
destined to die in the War?
The movie doesn't really address these moral
dilemmas with any depth and you wish that maybe they could have explored what
the weight of all that knowledge, of the wars to come, his friends' fates,
presumably even his own, would do to an ordinary man. Time travel isn't all
just sight seeing and picking up future babes.
You do admire George for putting
his money where his mouth is and returning to the future to help the Eloi out.
The prospect of starting over is probably both simultaneously daunting and
exhilarating. With the time machine though, I suppose he could just go back
and forth until he gets it right.
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