Directed by: Simon Wells
Starring: Guy Pearce, Samantha Mumba, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Giullory, Mark Addy, Orlando Jones
Very few movies about time travel are dull. Then there's The Time Machine, starring Guy Pearce as a time machine inventor who travels to the past to prevent his beloved fiancee's untimely death. After that fails, he ultimately 800,000 years into the future to take part in war between the Elois and the Morlocks. It's as if The Time Machine were spliced together out of two completely different movies and it's more difficult to determine which one is more depressing.
Alexander Hartegen (Pearce) is a hard-working late 19th-century scientist with a lovely girlfriend named Emma (Guillory) who is murdered during a holdup moments after Alexander proposes to her. A grieving Alexander manufactures a time machine four years later and whisks himself back to the moments before Emma is killed so he could prevent her death. He manages to spare her from dying by gunshot, but soon after she is run over by a runaway horse and dies again. Alexander is of course distraught and says "he can't find the answers here" and soon plunges the time machine forward at first to 22nd century New York City and then 8,000 centuries into the future.
When he's in the future, it feels like a prehistoric age with nothing but forests around and the two races of beings at war. The Morlocks more or less feed on Elois and Alexander helps Mara (Mumba), the Eloi with which he falls in love, and her tribe fight off the Morlocks. Jeremy Irons shows up for a few minutes as the Uber Morlock, whose face is plastered with too much makeup and rambles on about time travel. The one advantage Irons has over the other actors is that he only has one or two scenes while the rest of the poor actors have to be onscreen much more.
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