Let’s Watch: The Time Machine (2002)

Time Batman

*Every week, the While Rome Burns crew gathers ‘round to watch a film of questionable content and give their two cents as it unfolds. This is a collection of the best pennies from those sessions for you.*

“One Piece? Yes I have the entire story here. No, the treasure wasn’t “the friends we made along the way”. It was actually a treasure chest filled with hamdingers. Eiichiro Oda really loved Mystery Science Theater 3000. Who knew?”

The Film We Watched:

“My proposal for utilizing solar power… rejected. My concepts for harnessing microenergy waves… rejected. The Dean suggests that I focus on something that might actually help mankind… like his study on the benefits of tobacco consumption!”

What They Say This Movie Is About:

Turn-of-the-century New York City inventor and time traveler Alexander Hartdegen is determined to change the past after his girlfriend is killed during a violent robbery. But instead, he’s thrust 800,000 years into the future and finds himself caught in a war between two evolved human races.

What This Movie Is Actually About:

86 years before an eccentric Californian would create his own machine out of a car, Guy Pearce builds a time machine that can’t move in a 3D space but somehow moves with the Earth. Technically we’re constantly moving throughout the universe all the time, so when he traveled he should’ve appeared in the middle of the vacuum of space and instantly died, but that makes for a much shorter movie so instead he makes friends with a Wikipedia bot and argues with pale mole people.

Why This Movie Is Actually Good:

The costume design for the Morlocks is incredible. They actually earned a “Best Makeup” nomination for the 2003 Academy Awards. Just check out this piece on it:

[embed]Creating Morlocks for The Time Machine (2002): Behind the Scenes at the Stan Winston Studio Read how the Stan Winston Studio created Morlocks for The Time Machine (2002) and the valuable lesson Stan Winston and…www.stanwinstonschool.com

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Plot Points By Point, With The Gang:

It’s 1899. Doctor Alexander Hartdegen is a charmingly befuddled inventor teaching at Columbia University. Life’s going well for him because today’s the day he proposes to his girlfriend Emma with a moonstone.

“Debate me on the dirigible, Mister Chapo!”

After she says yes, a random guy celebrates their engagement by mugging them with a gun. Alexander is all too willing to give the man his money, but the man also wants Emma’s ring. She refuses, and after a struggle, she’s shot in the chest and straight-up dies, right there.

“I’m in the man-radio-sphere!”

One four year anime-timeskip later, Alex is looking pretty rough. He’s not much for sleeping, eating, or shaving his face, because he’s busy building a time machine. His reason? He wants to go back to 1899 and prevent Emma’s death.

“You gonna travel to the future to talk to a therapist orrrrr…”

After firing up his super-cool looking steampunk-ish time machine, he manages to go back in time and prevents Emma’s death by taking her away from the park long before his other self can propose.

He’s right, you know.

However, as he steps aside to buy her some flowers, she literally dies in the background by some horses running her over.

They even toss in a stock sound effect of a woman screaming.

Distraught that Emma’s going to die no matter what he does, Alex turns to the future in hopes that science can explain how to undo events in the past.

And if that happened? They’d use the same sound effect.

He travels to the year 2030, and on the way, his locket with Emma falls out onto the floor next to the machine. As Alex tries to grab it, he observes his fingernails rapidly growing while his hand is outside the confines of his time machine.

“Selling my three bedroom, 1.5 bath home in Kentucky for $4 million. FIRM. Don’t try to low ball me you blue haired latte-slurping entitled brats, I know what my house is worth!”

Once he’s in 2030, Alex asks a virtual librarian AI system if it can be done. The librarian smugly replies that it’s not possible because no one can travel to the past.

“Nevermind.”

Unsatisfied with this bullshit answer, Alex travels to 2037, just in time to see the moon has been blown up by miners attempting to create a retirement home on it.

Sneaky sneaky, Rae.

Alex escapes the falling debris, only for a moon rock to knock him unconscious while he travels further into the future, accidentally setting the machine into super high-speed. As it turns out, the destruction of the moon makes the earth inhabitable, causing the land to terraform around the time machine as rivers form canyons, a second ice age appears and melts, and a jungle grows where Manhattan once resided. When Alex wakes up, it’s July 16th, of 802,701.

The Rae Cinematic Universe.

Humanity has split off into two groups at this point — the Eloi, humans who continue to live on the surface, and Morlocks, deformed/mutated humans who live underground.

Hmmm….

A woman named Mara nurses Alex back to health and shows him their culture, where humanity has basically regressed to hunter/gatherer status while also being occasionally hunted by the Morlocks. After Mara gets kidnapped by a Morlock, her brother leads Alex to the same AI computer from 2030, somehow still running after all this time.

As it turns out!

The AI remembers Alex and explains to him how humanity split into two, and where they can be found. Alex heads on over to Morlock HQ, only to get yeeted into an area next to a cage where Mara is imprisoned. He tries talking to her while she stares slack-jawed at someone off-camera. That someone? Jeremy Irons, in full white makeup as an Uber-Morlock. Turns out there’s a subsection of Morlocks that have telepathic powers and use the surface dwellers for food and to breed, continuing their bloodline.

Do we have any footage of David Bowie and Jeremy Irons interacting?

Uber explains to Alex that he can read his thoughts and gives him the answer he seeks — Alex can’t change the past because the past is the reason he built the time machine in the first place. If Emma didn’t die that night, he’d have no ambition or reason to build it, thus causing a paradox that would probably collapse reality if he somehow defied reality.

“Can we also find out why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch?

Normally I’d tell you at this point to watch the film to see for yourself how it ends, but I’m feeling like mixing it up a little bit. So here’s what happens. Mister Uber tells Alex to head home in his time machine because he has his answer now. Alex is all like “nah, Imma save Mara” and coaxes Uber into fighting him on his time machine while it rapidly travels into the future. In the struggle, Uber manages to choke Alex and Alex pushes him out of the distortion field surrounding the time machine, which makes Uber age super rapidly until he crumbles to dust, leaving only the hands (around Alex’s neck) behind.

Now there’s a query for the AI librarian.

Alex travels about 600 million years into the future, only to see that the Morlocks still rule the Earth and have ruined the surface. So, Alex comes back to 802,701, jams his time machine’s gears with his pocketwatch, pulls a lever, and causes the machine to malfunction. He and Mara escape to the surface just as the time machine explodes, killing all the Morlocks and destroying their caves. One teeny tiny anime time skip later, Alex and Mara have formed a relationship, and he and the AI librarian proceed to educate the surface humans to start a new life.

And they never defeated the Senate Parlimentarian. The End.

Should You Watch This Film?

I have a soft spot for all time travel films (yes, that includes Needle in a Timestack), so I’d say yes. But you probably shouldn’t listen to me on this one. Apparently this film deviates greatly from the source material to tell its own love story about accepting loss and overcoming grief. Which in and of itself isn’t a bad story, but there’s nothing wrong with the original source material, either.

Best Out Of Context Riff Of The Night: