Reviewing The Situation - The Time Machine
Wells, Wells, Wells...
It's astonishing that HG Wells' acclaimed tomes should have inspired so many duff movies. Besides Things To Come (which he scripted) and the original Invisible Man, Wells-based movies have largely been underwhelming.
No wonder then that hopes were so high for this second big-screen adaptation of The Time Machine. The decision to hire Wells' great-grandson Simon to direct left many confident the film would buck the trend. This confidence was, alas, misplaced.
After the death of his fiancée, mathematician Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) invents a time machine to go back and alter the past, but ends up 800,000 years into a future where Earth is in the clutches of primitive civil war. Humans have evolved into two races: the above ground Eloi, who are quite nice; and the nasty, underground Morlocks, who come up at night to hunt the Eloi.
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