time travel 2002

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The Time Machine

Hoping to alter the events of the past, a 19th century inventor instead travels 800,000 years into the future, where he finds humankind divided into two warring races.
Based on the classic sci-fi novel by H.G. Wells, scientist and inventor, Alexander Hartdegen, is determined to prove that time travel is possible. His determination is turned to desperation by a personal tragedy that now drives him to want to change the past. Testing his theories with a time machine of his own invention, Hartdegen is hurtled 800,000 years into the future, where he discovers that mankind has divided into the hunter - and the hunted. — Tim1370
Alexander Hartdegen is a scientist and a inventor, who is determined to prove that time travel is possible. When the girl he loves is tragically killed, Alexander is determined to go back in time and change the path. Testing his theories, the time machine is hurtled 800,000 years into the future. He he discovers a terrifying new world. Instead of mankind being the hunter, they are now the hunted, with him stuck in the middle. — simon
After his fiancé is murdered a young physics professor decides to build a time machine in order to change the past. After traveling back and finding his attempt to save her life thwarted, the professor then decides to travel into the future to find answers. Finding himself in 2037, he is dazzled by technology but narrowly escapes as the moon is destroyed due to futuristic colonization. Falling into his time machine he accidentally goes 800,000 years into the future. He finds the world is broken into castes and uses his machine and humanity to reset the world order. — MacGroovyJM
Alex Hartdegen is a scientist living at 1899 in New York City. Obsessed with the idea of time travel, he teaches at Columbia University as a professor of "Applied Mechanics and Engineering" and gets into trouble for his radical theories. He is a pen pal of Albert Einstein. As he goes to the park to meet his girlfriend Emma, he becomes distracted by an early motor car beside the park gates. He puts himself in immediate good graces with the driver who, while refueling, forgot to activate the parking brake something Alexander does quickly when it threatens get out of control. Forgetting the flowers, he meets Emma at the skating rink; they walk through the park where Alexander proposes to Emma. However, the romantic moment is short-lived: a robber emerges from nearby bushes and holds a gun on them. As the thug attempts to take Emma's engagement ring, Alexander tries to intervene; during the struggle, the gun goes off and Emma is fatally wounded, dying in Alexander's arms. For the next four years, Alexander spends every waking hour in his laboratory working on his time travel calculations. Eventually, he succeeds in building a working time machine. His self-imposed exile has led to him being ostracized from his oldest friend David Philby, who eventually arrives at the lab to confront Alexander who in turn flies into a rage. Philby invites Alexander to dinner in the hope it would cause him to leave the lab and eventually return to a normal life, but Alexander postpones the dinner until the following week; after Philby has left Alexander remarks that in a week they "wouldn't have had this conversation". With the time machine finished, he travels back to that night four years ago and intercepts Emma before she was destined to meet his 1899 counterpart. Escorting her away from the park, they walk back to her apartment where he leaves her out in the street to purchase some flowers. However, despite Alexander having removed her from the danger of the robber, Emma is knocked down and trampled by a horse and carriage outside. The horses were spooked by the early motor car. Alexander realizes bitterly that if he prevents one means of Emma's death, another will take its place. Disenchanted with the prospect, he decides to go forward in time to find out if there are any answers in the future. [edit] The time travel Alexander stops in 2030 and learns that the Moon is being prepared for colonization. He visits the New York Public Library where he talks with Vox 114, the library's holographic, artificially intelligent librarian. He is given information on H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and even one of his own papers, but the library does not have any information on time travel theory; Vox states that such a thing is impossible. Frustrated, Alexander asks about the time machine itself and is given information on H.G. Wells' novel. Finding nothing of use, Alexander moves on to the future, until he hits a 'bump' seven years later in 2037, where he finds that the Moon mining operation has disrupted the lunar orbit. As a result, the Moon is breaking apart and showering Earth with massive chunks of rock. His presence outside of a shelter leads to an attempt by two military personnel to arrest him, but he escapes. He makes it into the machine just as the city is being destroyed, but is knocked unconscious and fails to witness the destruction of civilization. Alexander and his time machine speed through hundreds of millennia. Regaining consciousness, Alexander brings the machine to a halt in 802,701 AD, and finds that civilization has devolved to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Calling themselves the Eloi, these survivors have built their homes into the side of a cliff on what resembles Manhattan. Alexander begins to develop a relationship with a woman named Mara, a teacher, and one of few who recall some of the Time Traveler's now obsolete language. He also realizes the Moon is now broken in pieces. As Alexander is introduced to Eloi society, he is shown a collection of stone fragments and signs from what was once New York, including a sign from Tiffany and Co, the Empire State Building and a section of tiled panels from Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall Subway Station. While Alex is inspecting the machine after seeing an Eloi memorial for their parents, Mara tells him to go back to his own time and take her younger brother Kalen with him. Suddenly, the Eloi are attacked by Morlocks, monstrous, pale, ape-like creatures that hunt the Eloi for food. The Morlocks capture Mara and carry her off. Trying to find out where she has been taken, Alexander is told that "the Ghost" might know. As it turns out, the Eloi are speaking about Vox 114, the holographic librarian that Alexander had talked to before the destruction of the Moon, who is still functioning after all these years. With Vox 114's help, Alexander finds a way into the underground realm of the Morlocks, but is captured and taken to an underground chamber where Mara is kept in a cage, and where the Morlocks' leader, the Über-Morlock (played by Jeremy Irons), is waiting. The Über-Morlock reveals that they have a caste-like society, with each caste (nearly a different species in itself) fulfilling a different role in Morlock society. The ruling caste of this society are super-intelligent telepaths, while the hunters that Alex has encountered so far were bred to be predators. Attempting to explain his actions, the Über-Morlock reasons that he and his people are not evil. He asks "Who are you to question eight hundred thousand years... of evolution?" He also indicates that there are other clans similar to him. The Über-Morlock then reveals the reason why Alexander cannot alter Emma's fate: he is caught in a temporal paradox. Since Emma's death was the prime factor that drove him to build the time machine, he cannot use the machine without her death being incorporated into the timeline, as otherwise he would have had no reason to build the machine in the first place. The Über-Morlock also states that the Morlocks would not exist without those like Alexander in their quest for science and technology. Alexander learns that the Morlocks were people who chose to stay underground after the Moon collapsed and the Eloi were those who chose to brave the fallout. His time machine has been found by the Morlocks and taken underground. To escape, Alexander jumps into the machine and sends it hurtling forward in time, taking the Über-Morlock with him. The two of them fight until Alexander pushes him outside of the time sphere. He watches as the Über-Morlock ages and dies outside of the time bubble. Alexander slows the machine as the sky appears overhead. He has traveled to the year 635,427,810 AD, and the landscape is now a desolate wasteland, completely dominated by the Morlocks. Finally accepting that he can never save Emma, Alexander travels back in time to rescue the trapped Mara. After setting her free and before escaping, he sets the time machine to travel to the future and uses his pocket watch to jam the controls, causing it to malfunction and explode, creating a time distortion stream. Alexander and Mara escape just as the explosion kills off the Morlocks. Trapped in the future, Alexander resolves to build a new life for himself with Mara. He begins to rebuild civilization, Vox telling the Eloi the stories in his memory. This closing scene is shown side by side with a sequence in the year 1903, where David Philby chats with Alexander's elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Watchit, before leaving and throwing away his bowler hat on the street.

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20 years ago, H.G. Wells’ great-grandson reimagined a time travel classic

For The Time Machine ’s 20th anniversary, Simon Wells gets candid about remaking an iconic sci-fi adventure.

In 2002, H.G. Wells’ classic 1895 novella, The Time Machine , was given a glossy modern makeover as a Hollywood feature directed by the legendary author’s great-grandson, British filmmaker Simon Wells.

Before stepping into The Time Machine , Wells cut his teeth with animation work on blockbuster movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? before helming DreamWorks classics like An American Tail: Fievel Goes West , Balto , and The Prince of Egypt .

The 2002 film was the second attempt to bring the clock-spinning story to the silver screen, with the first being a beloved 1960 adaptation delivered by special effects wizard George Pal and starring Rod Taylor as the ambitious inventor. Guy Pearce ( L.A. Confidential , Memento ) took the starring role in the new Time Machine and plays Alexander Hartdegen, a late 19th century Columbia University physics professor whose fiancée (Sienna Guillory) is accidentally murdered during a robbery.

His grief drives him to complete a fantastic machine to travel through time and change the tragedy’s outcome. When he discovers that fate can’t be altered, he heads into the far future and encounters a race of savage creatures called the Morlock who have enslaved primitive humans called the Eloi. Hartdegen meets an Eloi, named Mara (Samantha Mumba), and together they begin an uprising to stop the Morlocks’ brutal reign.

THE RULES OF TIME TRAVEL is an Inverse special issue exploring the evolution of science fiction's most imaginative sub-genre. From Marty McFly to Avengers: Endgame .

Screenwriter John Logan combined elements from Wells’ story with a romantic tragedy and changed the setting from London to New York City. Several new characters, such as a humorous AI (Orlando Jones) and a sinister Morlock overlord (Jeremy Irons) also help freshen things up.

The Time Machine represented Simon Wells’ first foray into complex live-action features, and at times, he felt woefully unprepared for the project’s $80 million budget.

“I was surrounded by incredibly smart and good people on The Time Machine who saved me from making an absolute ass of myself,” Simon Wells tells Inverse .

In our interview with Wells, the director speaks about the pressures of adapting his famous ancestor’s iconic novel, manifesting the Morlocks’ animatronic masks, and the whereabouts of the actual time machine prop today.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Simon Wells at the helm of the time machine.

INVERSE: How does The Time Machine hold up for you two decades after its release?

SIMON WELLS: I’ve got to be honest; I don’t go back and watch movies I’ve made. Way back in the beginning of my career, I was Supervising Animator on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and it was about six years before I could see part of it without memories of the making of the movie overwhelming me. It was a good 10 years before I could actually see the movie the way other people saw it. There tend to be painful memories that make you flinch deep inside.

“I said, ‘Hey guys, I really ought to be directing this because, you know, the name!’”

How did you become attached to Time Machine, and, being part of the Wells legacy, did the job come with added pressures?

The project moved around a good deal. Originally, Brad Silberling was going to direct it, then Steven Spielberg decided he wanted it. Then he was going to go off to do something else, and it went back to Brad, but he’d moved on. So they were looking around for a director. I’d just come off The Prince of Egypt, and I threw my name in the ring because I had an interest in getting into live-action.

I said, “Hey guys, I really ought to be directing this because, you know, the name!”

Steven really liked that idea, and I’d worked with him for many years by then. So I just kind of got offered the gig. Looking back, it was far too big a movie given my limited experience in live-action.

The film’s early segments capture the feel of 19th-century New York.

What was the biggest adjustment going from animation to live-action?

It was a combination of the sense of personal responsibility and the sheer punishing schedule of getting something like that done. The director of an animation feature has a lot of people around him, and you have time to fix things. It doesn’t all have to get done that day because you’re shooting and you don’t have the location tomorrow.

The ambition of it was huge. The actual process: how to put shots together, how to build up a scene, that’s very similar to animation. The hard part was dealing with the sheer stress and logistics of it all. You have a bunch of people helping you and organizing everything though.

“I didn’t really know as much about the story as I should have.”

When we’d roll out to the location at Sand Canyon Ranch in Santa Clarita, you’d see this circus of tents and trailers, and I’d think, “Holy cow, the number of people that are on this movie!” The actors go for touch-ups and makeup while the grips set up the cameras and the electrical guys are changing the lights and you’re aware that thousands of dollars are ticking away and you’re just sitting there twiddling your thumbs. The stress is enormous.

Jeremy Irons plays a telepathic overlord, a character absent from the novel.

What elements of the original H.G. Wells novel were important to retain?

I came into that movie after a lot of work had been done developing the story. I didn’t really know as much about the story as I should have. I was more the director for hire, and I didn’t know enough to exert influence. I had more impact on the overall look of the movie and had great fun working with [production designer] Ollie Scholl in designing the time machine.

What was it like working with Guy Pearce and forming the time traveler’s character?

Guy is an interesting actor. I was keen on casting him because of Memento , where he was immensely charming and unguarded. I think it’s one of the best things he’s ever been in. As an actor, he has an immense amount of experience. He’s worked with good directors and very bad directors. He defends himself by having rehearsed what he’s going to do very carefully and that protects him against inexperienced directors, like me.

He had a clear idea of what he wanted to do and was not interested in free-forming anything. That was probably a good thing because I didn’t know much about directing actors. He was always there, always prepared, always professional, and never late to set.

What were your associations with the 1960 version of The Time Machine?

It is a good movie. I remember seeing it as a kid, and it deeply affected me. It’s a pretty straightforward adventure movie, and there are a lot of things about it that are terrific. For its time, the visual effects are pretty impressive. It was very much a B-movie in terms of its budget.

The villainous Morlocks, who had serious vision problems.

You had an all-star team of visual effects firms working on The Time Machine . What was the collaboration with these famous crews like?

The Morlock design was great fun. Had I known more about it going in, I would have had the design slightly differently. For the Morlock faces, the actors don’t actually see out through those eyes, those eyes are animatronic. They’re seeing out through a little camera in the nose. They had these little TV screens on glasses that were right in front of their eyes. I feel really bad for those stuntmen. It was an impossible thing to have to work inside, and they did a tremendous job.

Nowadays, every movie employs every visual effects firm out there. It’s hilarious. You sit and watch the credits for Marvel movies and wonder if there’s anybody that didn’t work on this film. That was all starting to happen way back then, to have multiple visual effects houses doing stuff. Industrial Light & Magic did the CG Morlock sequences, Stan Winston did the actual physical things, and the rest was Digital Domain.

“It was a million-dollar prop so they weren’t going to let me have it.”

Where did that elaborate time machine prop from the movie end up?

Warner Bros. has it. It was a million-dollar prop so they weren’t going to let me have it. Also, it weighed like a ton and a half. That central bulb had the transmission of a Buick built in it and this huge five-horsepower electric motor so you don’t just put it in the back of your car. Plus, the sphere has a diameter of something like 10 feet.

It was in the Warner museum. I got to go visit it once, but since then it’s been relegated to one of those Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouses filled with movie stuff. It’s a pity because it genuinely looked good. It’s a shame it’s not on display in one of the theme parks somewhere.

Guy Pearce in The Time Machine .

Having immersed yourself in the subject, do you believe in the possibility of time travel?

The difficulty with time travel is that if it existed, we would already know about it. Unless we happen to be on one of the timelines where it doesn’t happen. There’s a logical conundrum involved in time travel, which is why I’ve never done another time travel story since.

Are we going to do the multiverse idea where if you go into the past and alter even the slightest thing, the future you come into is not the one you left? That’s what they played around with in Back to the Future II and III .

Did you keep any mementos from the sets of The Time Machine?

I have one of the control levers from the time machine, which is beautiful. It’s turned brass with a crystal on top. And I got one of the watches that got crushed in the time machine mechanism. They built a bunch of lead replicas they could drag in for multiple takes, so I kept one of those.

Looking back, I was surrounded by incredibly smart and good people on The Time Machine who saved me from making an absolute ass of myself. I am grateful to the people who dragged that movie through for me. I rode on their shoulders to an amazing extent.

The Time Machine is streaming on Paramount+.

Science Fiction

The Time Machine

“The Time Machine” is a witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing. It makes use of computer-aided graphics to create a future race of grubby underground beasties, who like the characters in “Battleship Earth” have evolved beyond the need for bathing and fingernail clippers. Since this race–the Morlocks–is allegedly a Darwinian offshoot of humans, and since they are remarkably unattractive, they call into question the theory that over a long period of time a race grows more attractive through natural selection. They are obviously the result of 800,000 years of ugly brides.

The film stars Guy Pearce as Alexander Hartdegen, a brilliant mathematician who hopes to use Einstein’s earliest theories to build a machine to travel through time. He is in love with the beautiful Emma ( Sienna Guillory ), but on the very night when he proposes marriage, a tragedy happens, and he vows to travel back in time in his new machine and change the course of history.

The machine, which lacks so much as a seat belt, consists of whirling spheres encompassing a Victorian club chair. Convenient brass gauges spin to record the current date. Speed and direction are controlled by a joystick. The time machine has an uncanny ability to move in perfect synchronization with the Earth, so that it always lands in the same geographical spot, despite the fact that in the future large chunks of the moon (or all of it, according to the future race of Eloi) have fallen to the Earth, which should have had some effect on the orbit. Since it would be inconvenient if a time machine materialized miles in the air or deep underground, this is just as well.

We will not discuss paradoxes of time travel here, since such discussion makes any time travel movie impossible. Let us discuss instead an unintended journey, which Hartdegen makes to 8,000 centuries in the future, when Homo sapiens has split in two, into the Eloi and Morlocks. The Morlocks evolved underground in the dark ages after the moon’s fall, and attack on the surface by popping up through dusty sinkholes. They hunt the Eloi for food. The Eloi are an attractive race of brown-skinned people whose civilization seems modeled on paintings by Rousseau; their life is an idyll of leafy bowers, waterfalls and elegant forest structures, but they are such fatalists about the Morlocks that instead of fighting them off, they all but salt and pepper themselves.

Alexander meets a beautiful Eloi woman named Mara ( Samantha Mumba ) and her sturdy young brother, befriends them and eventually journeys to the underworld to try to rescue her. This brings him into contact with the Uber-Morlock, a chalk-faced Jeremy Irons , who did not learn his lesson after playing an evil Mage named Profion in “Dungeons & Dragons.” In broad outline, this future world matches the one depicted in George Pal’s 1960 film “The Time Machine,” although its blond, blue-eyed race of Eloi have been transformed into dusky sun people. One nevertheless tends to question romances between people who were born 800,000 years apart and have few conversations on subjects other than not being eaten. Convenient, that when humankind was splitting into two different races, both its branches continued to speak English.

The Morlocks and much of their world have been created by undistinguished animation. The Morlock hunters are supposed to be able to leap great distances with fearsome speed, but the animation turns them into cartoonish characters whose movements defy even the laws of gravity governing bodies in motion. Their movements are not remotely plausible, and it’s disconcerting to see that while the Eloi are utterly unable to evade them, Irons, a professor who has scarcely left his laboratory for four years, is able to duck out of the way, bean them with big tree branches, etc.

Pearce, as the hero, makes the mistake of trying to give a good and realistic performance. Irons at least knows what kind of movie he’s in, and hams it up accordingly. Pearce seems thoughtful, introspective, quiet, morose. Surely the inventor of a time machine should have a few screws loose, and the glint in his eye should not be from tears.

By the end of the movie, as he stands beside the beautiful Eloi woman and takes her hand, we are thinking, not of their future together, but about how he got from the Morlock caverns to the top of that mountain ridge in time to watch an explosion that takes only a few seconds. A Morlock could cover that distance, but not a mathematician, unless he has discovered worm holes as well.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.