time travel 2002

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

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, the time machine.

Now streaming on:

"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.

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Film credits.

The Time Machine (2002)

Rated PG-13 Intense Sequences Of Action Violence

Guy Pearce as Alexander

Jeremy Irons as Uber-Morlock

Yancey Arias as Toren

Sienna Guillory as Emma

Samantha Mumba as Mara

Orlando Jones as Vox

Mark Addy as Dr. Philby

Directed by

• Simon Wells

Based on the book by

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The Time Machine

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Rent The Time Machine on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

This Machine has all the razzle-dazzles of modern special effects, but the movie takes a turn for the worst when it switches from a story about lost love to a confusing action-thriller.

Critics Reviews

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Simon Wells

Alexander Hartdegen

Samantha Mumba

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Sienna Guillory

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The Time Machine

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Brief Synopsis

Cast & crew, simon wells, phyllida law, orlando jones, jeremy irons, technical specs.

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. There he finds a post-apocalyptic world where he discovers that mankind has been divided into the hunter... and the hunted.

Sienna Guillory

Samantha mumba, omero mumba, john w momrow, jeffrey m meyer.

Myndy Crist

Lennie loftin, thomas corey robinson, yancey arias, richard cetrone, eddie conna, christopher sayour, jeremy fitzgerald, craig davis, grady holder, bryan friday, clint lilley, jeff pdogurski, bryon weiss, steve upton, dorian kingi, jacob chambers, kevin mcturk, michael chaturantabut, jonathan eusebio, roel failma, diana lee inosanto, malaea chona jason, yoshio iizuka, john koyama, gail monian, maro uo richmond, petra sprecher, jon j. valera, larry a cornick, robin koenig, donovan a. scott, charles abou aad, jan h. aaris, delara c adams, matthew adams, stephanie allen, richard alonzo, robert alonzo, miles anderson, paul h anderson, ross a anderson, susan anderson, tony anderson, darryl anka, deena appel, carlos a araiza, james ashwill, maryellen aviano-roberts, keith baber, klaus badelt, wayne baker, jeffrey baksinski, clayton barber, alberto barboza, geoffrey e baumann, peter baustaedter, chuck beamis, bill beasley, lisa bechard, brian begun, jennifer k bell, jon g belyeu, david beneke, krista benson, jill berger, nancy bernstein, tom bertino, johnny beyers, mark binder, duncan blackman, steve blalock, deborah 'cha' blevins, melanie boettcher, louella boquiren, kevin bouchez, brigitte bourque, patrick g brady, justin brandstater, stephen c brandt, randy bricker, christopher s brooks, michael broomberg, bob f brown, charles brown, dartenea bryant, stephen burg, greg burgan, sonja burhcard, christopher burian-mohr, gary burritt, amanda burton, ronnie bushaw, jeff butcher, norman cabrera, ed callahan, jodi campanaro, marco campos, rick canelli, tamara carlson-woodard, roberto m carneiro, glenn m. carrere, mike castillo, oscar g castillo, john f castro, rick cedillo, lanny cermak, karen k chang, nikia charles, jim charmatz, john cherevka, michael chock, pamela choules, lynda cipperley, kevin clark, richard a clark, robert clotworthy, michael coady, dan cobbett, martin cohen, grazia como, eric p cook, cora lee coomber, andrew cooper, matt cordner, angelo corello, john michael courte, marcy craig, kelly g crawford, robert c crockett, michael d'imperio, tonia davall, chris dawson, bruce de aragon, carlos de la torre, nancy deamicis, bruce dearagon, aladino v debert, william decker, stephen p del prete, mark della rosa, eileen dennis, patsy deshields, vashti desire, maria devane, sean devereaux, kelsee devoreaux, gary c diamond, david diano, dawn dininger, ramin djawadi, perry dodgson, shirley dolle, james dooley, brady doyle, loring doyle, michael duenas, david duncan, michael dunivant, rachel dunn, jeff durling, timothy eaton, scott edelstein, sam edwards, jonathan egstad, john m. elliott jr., margeret e elliott, stephen a elsbree, richard epper, orlando estrada, deborah c evans, sean andrew faden, matthew fairclough, alan faucher, michael fenster, aaron ferguson, brigitte r. ferry, robert fetchman, sean p. fickert, eric fiedler, greg figiel, claire flewin, glenn forbes, lucinda foy, holly c frabizio, carl frederick, todd fulford, david gainey, award nominations, best makeup, remake - the time machine.

Miscellaneous Notes

Released in United States Spring March 8, 2002

Released in United States on Video July 23, 2002

Feature live action directorial debut for director Simon Wells, co-director of the animated hit "The Prince of Egypt" (USA/1998). Simon Wells is the great-grandson of H.G. Wells, author of the sci-fi classic, "The Time Machine."

Began shooting February 5, 2001.

Gore Verbinski directed the last 18 days of principal photography, when Simon Wells dropped out due to extreme exhaustion. Simon Wells returned for post-production.

Completed shooting June 20, 2001.

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Rotten Tomatoes® Score

An underappreciated movie anchored by a fine lead performance by Guy Pearce.

While I appreciate the ambition... all it made me do is want to watch the one from 1960.

Many things have changed from both the famous source material and the 1960 feature by George Pal that simply aren't as amusing.

Large swaths of the story don't make sense, though there is brilliance in a few minor plot points.

With a nice mix of light humor, action, adventure and some thought-provoking ideas, The Time Machine is an interesting look at "What If." And it's got some really cool gizmos to boot.

A good movie based on H.G. Wells' classic novel.

A loud annoying movie with poor directing and plot holes galore...

Although it gets off to a decent start, this "Time Machine" breaks down when it gets to the distant future, which in this case isn't a good place to be stranded.

The Time Machine is harmless, if ineffectual fun.

Additional Info

• Genre : Sci-Fi, Action
• Release Date : March 8, 2002
• Languages : English
• Captions : English
• Audio Format : Stereo

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New Releases

The Time Machine (2002)

What’s the deal with time travel lately?

Artistic/Entertainment Value

Moral/spiritual value, age appropriateness, mpaa rating, caveat spectator.

First we had Kate and Leopold , a fairly dopey romantic comedy in which people jump into time rifts but never seem to fall out of them, elevators stop working for reasons that make no sense at all, and someone sees herself in a photograph before the photo could possibly have existed, even on the movie’s own time-bending rules.

And now we have another cinematic take on H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine , directed by Wells’s great-grandson Simon Wells ( The Prince of Egypt ) — who owes everyone in his family a big apology. The Time Machine is so sloppy that it makes Kate and Leopold look like Back to the Future . It’s also pitiful entertainment, succeeding neither as spectacle, as action-adventure, or as love story.

Time travel, when done right, speaks to the longings of the human heart to escape the confines of time and space, to see the wrongs of the past set right, redeemed. ( Frequency is a good example of this.)

The Time Machine is time travel done wrong — way wrong. The setup: Guy Pearce ( The Count of Monte Cristo ; Memento ) plays Dr. Alexander Hartdegen, an 19th-century scientist who spends years researching, developing, and building the first working time machine after tragically losing his fiancée Emma (Sienna Guillory) to a mugger’s bullet.

With his machine, Alexander returns to the eve of Emma’s death, intercepts her before she can be killed by the mugger, and spirits her safely to another location. Then, he turns his back for a moment — and she gets killed again — this time in a freak traffic accident. It’s like a scene out of Monty Python. When the film’s presumptive love interest is killed, and the screening audience cracks up, it’s a bad sign.

Wait, there’s more. Emma’s second death prompts Alexander to conclude that he "can’t change the past," and specifically can’t save Emma’s life. "I could come back a thousand times," he murmurs, "see her die a thousand ways."

Huh? This guy is a scientist? What kind of scientist concludes that a coin that comes up heads twice in a row will never come up tails? More importantly, what kind of man works for years to save the love of his life, then gives up after one try?

How can Alexander even ask "Why can’t I change the past?" — when he manifestly has changed the past? He stopped Emma from getting shot by the mugger, didn’t he? That’s not changing the past? Granted, the "new" past is no better, from Alexander’s point of view, than the "old" one, but it’s still a change, isn’t it? Mightn’t another change save Emma’s life? Or is it his view that there’s some sinister, cosmic power gunning for Emma on this particular evening?

To try to learn the answers to these questions, and because it’s what the movie is really about anyway, Alexander decides to check out the future, on the theory that our enlightened descendants may have insight into the deepest mysteries of temporal mechanics and bad screenwriting.

As his gizmo rockets him into the future, he watches as the world around him changes at lightning speed: Ivy grows up the walls of his greenhouse, skyscrapers construct themselves around him, and people and things whip about him like the Flash, almost too fast to be seen. (Some things, like airplanes and satellites, inexplicably don’t go really fast, allowing us to get a good look at them and appreciate the passage of decades and centuries.)

I am thinking: If Alexander can see stuff around him moving at super-speed, shouldn’t everybody else be able to see him and his gizmo looking frozen like statues? After all, he’s sitting right there, not moving at all, relatively speaking, isn’t he? So why does it seem that he’s invisible to the world? Maybe it’s another one of those things we must just hope they can explain in the future.

Not much chance of that, though. After a stopoff in the Manhattan of the future (where they still don’t know anything about temporal mechanics), Alexander winds up in a dystopic far future in which civilization has fallen, due in part to the destruction of the moon, caused by ill-planned human excavation. The smartest person Alexander meets in this world is the cerebrally gifted leader of the Morlocks (for those not familiar with the story, Morlocks are predatory, subterranean creatures who prey upon the peaceful, surface-dwelling Eloi).

This Morlock leader (Jeremy Irons), telepathically reading Alexander’s questions from his mind, offers Alexander the closest thing he ever gets to an explanation why he "can’t change the past." Supposedly, it’s because Alexander only built the machine because Emma died; therefore, if he saves her, he’ll never build the machine, and if he never builds the machine, he can’t save her.

Now, that’s a perfectly respectable time paradox — but what does it have to do with Emma getting killed in two completely unrelated ways? It would be different if, after saving Emma, the future-Alexander were to try to return to his time-machine, only to find it missing, and then begin to fade away himself, like Marty McFly at the end of Back to the Future . But it doesn’t explain why that carriage had Emma’s name on it.

The kicker is that all this absurdity stems from a storyline that isn’t even in the original book or the 1960 film version. The whole Emma subplot was added to make the hero’s quest a romantic one (rather than a merely scientific one) for today’s post- Titanic audiences. Yet how "romantic" is it, when Emma drops out of the story forever after the first fifteen minutes? In her place, we get an Eloi babe (Samantha Mumba) who says something to Alexander about flowers, prompting him to looking meaningfully at her, as if to say, "You like flowers just like Emma did! Maybe you can take her place in the story and in my heart!"

Maybe, just maybe, I could get past all this, if the film at least worked as a futuristic action romp. But it doesn’t. The characters don’t matter a whit, and the action isn’t exciting, clever, or compelling.

The hero repeatedly does stupid things that the movie doesn’t recognize as stupid. In one scene, the villain allows Alexander to get into his time machine and leave; but Alexander wants to rescue the girl from the Morlock caverns. He could easily return to his own time and come back with firearms (or stop off at an intermediate time period and come back with serious weaponry); but instead he elects to engage the villain hand-to-hand, even though he’s already proved he’s no action hero and the Morlocks are tough as nails. (This scene had me wondering: How do you sucker-punch someone who’s telepathic? Does it make sense to fight someone who can mess with your mind enough to give you hallucinations?)

Then, after freeing the girl, instead of using the time machine to spirit her to a safer time and find another way of returning her to her people, Alexander rigs the machine to set off a sort of temporal explosion that will age into dust everything in range, then heads out to get the girl past the entire Morlock army and out of the tunnels before the explosion goes off.

Is he forgetting that it was ill-planned explosions beneath the moon’s surface that destroyed civilization? Didn’t he himself look up at the shattered moon and say "We went too far"? And now he’s setting off an uncontrolled, untested temporal explosion under the surface of the earth? How does he know he won’t destroy everything for ten miles, or all of North America, or the whole planet?

Even as mere eye candy, The Time Machine is largely a wash. True, the time-travel effects themselves are dazzling, and a couple of the settings (notably an all-too-brief glimpse of a futuristic Manhattan skyline and the charming cliffside dwellings of the Eloi) are worth looking at. But the Morlocks look like low-rent Uruk-hai from The Lord of the Rings (and move like low-rent apes from the Planet of the Apes remake), and their underground lair is a weak reminder of Saruman’s subterranean workshop.

Orlando Jones has a small role as Vox, a saucy hologram first seen in the futuristic Manhattan, before the fall of civilization. Later, though every building in Manhattan is destroyed without a trace, Vox miraculously survives, still manifesting through upright panes of glass that are now cracked and fragmentary. (Can anyone explain to me the scene in which Vox’s hand inexplicably extends beyond the edge of his glass boundaries so that he can touch a nearby skull? Anyone? Anyone?)

Vox remembers Alexander from having met him 800,000 years earlier in Manhattan, where the hologram blew off the time-traveler as a nut for asking about practical applications for time travel. It’s one of the film’s many small irritations that Vox never comes out and says, "Whoa! I guess time travel really is possible!" Maybe he found the whole thing as unconvincing as I did.

RE: The Time Machine

I was perusing some of the reviews on your site. There is one film on your which has a minor theme of evolution. The film is the 2002 version of The Time Machine . I don’t think your listing did not mention this about the film. I’m not sure if you missed this when watching the film or whether you choose not to include it. While the Catholic Church’s position on evolution may be ambiguous (based on what I have read), I think it is worthy to mention it. Catholics and Protestants (such as myself) have varying beliefs when it comes to the creation/evolution controversy.

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Time Traveler

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2002 Dallas, Texas

The award-winning band 2002 has placed 12 albums on the Billboard Charts. Over their 30 year career, their ever-evolving sound has encompassed a wide range of genres – from wistful ambient soundscapes all the way to light progressive rock. This daring blend of musical styles has given them an undeniable “signature sound” that sets them apart from other recording artists. ...   more

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The 50 All-Time Best Time-Travel Films

1. The Time Machine

2. Back to the Future

3. The Terminator

4. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

5. Time After Time

6. Donnie Darko

7. Planet of the Apes

8. Groundhog Day

9. Run Lola Run

10. Safety Not Guaranteed

11. Doctor Strange

12. Arrival

14. Interstellar

15. 12 Monkeys

16. La Jetée

17. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

18. Frequency

19. Timecrimes

20. Deja Vu

21. X-Men: Days of Future Past

22. Pleasantville

23. Edge of Tomorrow

24. The Philadelphia Experiment

25. About Time

More to explore, recently viewed.

Do you believe in time travel? I’m a skeptic myself — but if these people’s stories about time travel are to be believed, then I am apparently wrong. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll have to eat my words. In all honesty, that might not be so bad — because the tradeoff for being wrong in that case would be that time travel is real . That would be pretty rad if it were true.

Technically speaking time travel does exist right now — just not in the sci fi kind of way you’re probably thinking. According to a TED-Ed video by Colin Stuart, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev actually traveled 0.02 seconds into his own future due to time dilation during the time he spent on the International Space Station. For the curious, Krikalev has spent a total of 803 days, nine hours, and 39 minutes in space over the course of his career.

That said, though, many are convinced that time dilation isn’t the only kind of time travel that’s possible; some folks do also believe in time travel as depicted by everything from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine to Back to the Future . It’s difficult to find stories online that are actual accounts from real people — many of them are either urban legends ( hi there, Philadelphia Experiment ) or stories that center around people that I’ve been unable to verify actually exist — but if you dig hard enough, sincere accounts can be found.

Are the stories true? Are they false? Are they examples of people who believe with all their heart that they’re true, even if they might not actually be? You be the judge. These seven tales are all excellent yarns, at any rate.

The Moberly–Jourdain Incident

In 1901, two Englishwomen, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain , took a vacation to France. While they were there, they visited the Palace of Versailles (because, y’know, that’s what one does when one visits France ). And while they were at Versailles, they visited what’s known as the Petit Trianon — a little chateau on the palace grounds that Louis XVI gave to Marie Antoinette as a private space for her to hang out and do whatever it was that a teenaged queen did when she was relaxing back then.

But while they were there, they claimed, they saw some… odd occurrences. They said they spotted people wearing anachronistic clothing, heard mysterious voices, and saw buildings and other structures that were no longer present — and, indeed, hadn’t existed since the late 1700s. Finally, they said, they caught sight of Marie Antoinette herself , drawing in a sketchbook.

They claimed to have fallen into a “time slip” and been briefly transported back more than 100 years before being jolted back to the present by a tour guide.

Did they really travel back in time? Probably not; various explanations include everything from a folie a deux (basically a joint delusion) to a simple misinterpretation of what they actually saw. But for what it’s worth, in 1911 — roughly 10 years after what they said they had experienced occurred — the two women published a book about the whole thing under the names Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont simply called An Adventure. These days, it’s available as The Ghosts of Trianon ; check it out, if you like.

The Mystery Of John Titor

John Titor is perhaps the most famous person who claims he’s time traveled; trouble is, no one has heard from him for almost 17 years. Also, he claimed he came from the future.

The story is long and involved, but the short version is this: In a thread begun in the fall of 2000 about time travel paradoxes on the online forum the Time Travel Institute — now known as Curious Cosmos — a user responded to a comment about how a time machine could theoretically be built with the following message:

“Wow! Paul is right on the money. I was just about to give up hope on anyone knowing who Tipler or Kerr was on this worldline.

“By the way, #2 is the correct answer and the basics for time travel start at CERN in about a year and end in 2034 with the first ‘time machine’ built by GE. Too bad we can’t post pictures or I’d show it to you.”

The implication, of course, was that the user, who was going by the name TimeTravel_0, came from a point in the future during which such a machine had already been invented.

Over the course of many messages spanning from that first thread all the way through the early spring of 2001, the user, who became known as John Titor, told his story. He said that he had been sent back to 1975 in order to bring an IBM 5100 computer to his own time; he was just stopping in 2000 for a brief rest on his way back home. The computer, he said, was needed to debug “various legacy computer programs in 2036” in order to combat a known problem similar to Y2K called the Year 2038 Problem . (John didn’t refer to it as such, but he said that UNIX was going to have an issue in 2038 — which is what we thought was going to happen back when the calendar ticked over from 1999 to 2000.)

Opinions are divided on whether John Titor was real ; some folks think he was the only real example of time travel we’ve ever seen, while others think it’s one of the most enduring hoaxes we’ve ever seen. I fall on the side of hoax, but that’s just me.

Project Pegasus And The Chrononauts

In 2011, Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings stepped forward, claiming that they were former “chrononauts” who had worked with an alleged DARPA program called Project Pegasus. Project Pegasus, they said, had been developed in the 1970s; in 1980, they were taking a “Mars training class” at a community college in California (the college presumably functioning as a cover for the alleged program) when they were picked to go to Mars. The mode of transport? Teleportation.

It gets better, too. Basiago and Stillings also said that the then- 19-year-old Barack Obama , whom they claimed was going by the name “Barry Soetero” at the time, was also one of the students chosen to go to Mars. They said the teleportation occurred via something called a “jump room.”

The White House has denied that Obama has ever been to Mars . “Only if you count watching Marvin the Martian,” Tommy Vietor, then the spokesman for the National Security Council, told Wired’s Danger Room in 2012.

Victor Goddard’s Airfield Time Slip

Like Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, senior Royal Air Force commander Sir Robert Victor Goddard — widely known as Victor Goddard — claimed to have experienced a time slip.

In 1935, Goddard flew over what had been the RAF station Drem in Scotland on his way from Edinburgh to Andover, England. The Drem station was no longer in use; after demobilization efforts following WWI, it had mostly been left to its own devices. And, indeed, that’s what Goddard said he saw as he flew over it: A largely abandoned airfield.

On his return trip, though, things got… weird. He followed the same route he had on the way there, but during the flight, he got waylaid by a storm. As he struggled to regain control of his plane, however, he spotted the Drem airfield through a break in the clouds — and when he got closer to it, the bad weather suddenly dissipated. But the airfield… wasn’t abandoned this time. It was busy, with several planes on the runway and mechanics scurrying about.

Within seconds, though, the storm reappeared, and Goddard had to fight to keep his plane aloft again. He made it home just fine, and went on to live another 50 years — but the incident stuck with him; indeed, in 1975, he wrote a book called Flight Towards Reality which included discussion of the whole thing.

Here’s the really weird bit: In 1939, the Drem airfield was brought back to life. Did Goddard see a peek into the airfield's future via a time slip back in 1935? Who knows.

Space Barbie

I’ll be honest: I’m not totally sure what to do with thisone — but I’ll present it to you here, and then you can decide for yourself what you think about it. Here it is:

Valeria Lukyanova has made a name for herself as a “human Barbie doll” (who also has kind of scary opinions about some things ) — but a 2012 short documentary for Vice’s My Life Online series also posits that she believes she’s a time traveling space alien whose purpose on Earth is to aid us in moving “from the role of the ‘human consumer’ to the role of ‘human demi-god.’”

What I can’t quite figure out is whether this whole time traveling space alien thing is, like a piece of performance art created specifically for this Vice doc, or whether it’s what she actually thinks. I don’t believe she’s referenced it in many (or maybe even any) other interviews she’s given; the items I’ve found discussing Lukyanova and time travel specifically all point back to this video.

But, well… do with it all as you will. That’s the documentary up there; give it a watch and see what you think.

The Hipster Time Traveler

In the early 2010s, a photograph depicting the 1941 reopening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia in Canada went viral for seemingly depicting a man that looked… just a bit too modern to have been photographed in 1941. He looks, in fact, like a time traveling hipster : Graphic t-shirt, textured sweater, sunglasses, the works. The photo hadn’t been manipulated; the original can be seen here . So what the heck was going on?

Well, Snopes has plenty of reasonable explanations for the man’s appearance; each item he’s wearing, for example, could very easily have been acquired in 1941. Others have also backed up those facts. But the bottom line is that it’s never been definitively debunked, so the idea that this photograph could depict a man from our time who had traveled back to 1941 persists. What do you think?

Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor

According to two at least two books — Catholic priest Father Francois Brune’s 2002 book Le nouveau mystère du Vatican (in English, The Vatican’s New Mystery ) and Peter Krassa’s 2000 book Father Ernetti's Chronovisor : The Creation and Disappearance of the World's First Time Machine — Father Pellegrino Ernetti, who was a Catholic priest like Brune, invented a machine called a “chronovisor” that allowed him to view the past. Ernetti was real; however, the existence of the machine, or even whether he actually claimed to have invented it, has never been proven. Alas, he died in 1994, so we can’t ask him, either. I mean, if we were ever able to find his chronovisor, maybe we could… but at that point, wouldn’t we already have the information we need?

(I’m extremely skeptical of this story, by the way, but both Brune’s and Krassa’s books swear up, down, left, and right that it’s true, so…you be the judge.)

Although I'm fairly certain that these accounts and stories are either misinterpreted information or straight-up falsehoods, they're still entertaining to read about; after all, if you had access to a time machine, wouldn't you at least want to take it for a spin? Here's hoping that one day, science takes the idea from theory to reality. It's a big ol' universe out there.

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England: Average travel time by public transport 2002-2022

In 2022, the public transport mode on which the average person in England spent the most time was surface rail at 21 hours per year. This was followed by local buses outside London at 14 hours and buses in London at hours.

Average travel time per person per year by public transport in England from 2002 to 2022, by mode (in hours)

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This statistic is using original data from the Government Digital Service and includes copyright material from © Crown, licensed under the  Open Government License v3.0 .

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