Ignore the misleading, mawkish commercials and trailers - Time Machine is more imaginative and rewarding than most of the junk released last summer. While not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, here are six reasons in might be worth your time:
Reason #1: Guy Pierce makes any film automatically better.
Pierce's fame has steadily grown to make him one of the new leading men of Hollywood, and this film proves that he can make anything better. He plays Alexander Hartdegen, a driven but shy scientist who has lines like, "I have a sickness, and the only cure is for you to spend the rest of your life with me." Now, reading that produces a sarcastic chortle, but hearing Guy Pierce say it ... well, you believe him. And when his fianc?© is killed, the look in his eyes says, yes, he will do anything to get her back. Even travel through time, if need be. How he does it we never quite understand.
Reason #2: Science Fiction works better as all science or all fiction.
And Time Machine is all fiction. Time travel, we learn, involves determination, writing down lots of equations, and getting into a cool looking machine right out of Disney's Tomorrowland. The machine spins and lots of lights come out, and time starts advancing in convenient day measurements. There are films that intelligently deal with the concept of time travel -12 Monkeys for instance - but those movies have different aims than this one, which is simply adventure. When I saw the day/ month/year calculator on the machine, I surrendered to the ridiculousness of it all and just enjoyed the ride.Reason #3: Special effects budgets are often wasted on monsters and explosions.
And thank the movie gods, this one is used wisely. There have been lots of time travel films, but few that handle the actual process as creatively as this film does. Seasons change and cities evolve before our eyes, as does civilization and the planet itself. These sequences are the highlight of the movie, and there are moments that rival the effects in Fellowship of the Ring. Once the film arrives at a set destination (800,000 years in the future,) the effects continue to be stellar. Instead of new things to fear and explode, we're actually given a new world to explore. Walls of a canyon teem with primitive life, bizarre windmills stretch into the sky, and a dark cavern crawls with the Moorlocks, headed up by the always-weird Jeremy Irons.Reason #4: Jeremy Irons makes any film automatically more interesting.
Whether chewing the scenery in Dungeons and Dragons or outsmarting Bruce Willis in Die Hard with a Vengance, Jeremy Irons is always a man to watch. He brings something to every movie, even if it is utter contempt for the material (Dungeons and Dragons, again) Here, he creates a villain that is always a bit smarter, sadder, and more three-dimensional then he has any right to be. Actually, all of the characters are a little more complete than you would think for a special effects movie.Reason #5: Mark Addy and Orlando Jones need a second wind.
Here are two very talented funnymen who have been stuck in shoddy vehicles ever since they briefly hit stardom. Mark Addy came to fame as the fat guy in The Full Monty, and has been stuck in crappy family films like Jack Frost and Flinstones: Viva Rock Vegas ever since. Orlando Jones has proved he can be hilarious, and yet he has been stuck in Eddie Griffin/Keanu Reeves/Brendan Fraser movie purgatory for far too long (Double Take, The Replacements and Bedazzled, respectively.) Here, they are given small but important parts and do lots with them. Addy is endearing in his brief role as Pierce's best friend, and Jones brings a lot of humanity to his role as an interactive database storing all human knowledge. He gets a nice moment where he asks Pierce, "Can you imagine what it would be like to remember everyone and everything, forever?"Reason #6: Simple twists are better than overly complex ones.
The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, and Fight Club all had simple answers to their respective puzzles, although that simple answer then redefined everything that came before it. Time Machine wisely follows suit. What drives Pierce's travel is the question, "Why can't he change what the past?" The answer he gets I will not reveal, but it makes you sit back and say, "Huh. Yeah, that is a good reason, isn't it?"The Time Machine is a decent movie. Is it what it could have been? No. But it is certainly more than the advertisements make it look like. The acting, concepts, and effects work are all well above average, and the movie is blessed with good energy and pacing by director Gore Verbinski (The Mexican). Is it worth eight dollars? No. But a trip to Somerville Theater might be just the ticket.
