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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