Grade: D

Verdict: Rent the 1960 version.

Details: Starring Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons and Orlando Jones. Directed by Simon Wells. Rated PG-13 for violence.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: When he wrote his first novel, "The Time Machine," in 1895, futurist and social commentator H.G. Wells almost single-handedly invented the science fiction genre. The book was an ominous vision of a distant future in which one species of human beings preyed upon another. Instead of some hoped-for Utopia, humankind had devolved into sophisticated savagery. Hailed for its secular prophecies and Darwinian subtext, "The Time Machine" was an immediate success, selling 6,000 copies in five months.

Wells' masterpiece was first adapted for the screen in 1960 by fantasy director George Pal. He turned it into an imaginative, well-made family film that, while more or less adhering to its source, made no attempt to examine the complexities and social implications of Wells' futuristic tale. But wasn't Hollywood hooey, either.

That can't be said for the current "Time Machine, " which gives a new and creative twist to the notion of nepotism. This version has been directed by Simon Wells, H.G.'s great-grandson. What the younger Wells has done is sell his birthright for a mess of bread and pottage. (Translation: a shot at Hollywood clout.) Any resemblance between this idiocy and the original novel is almost accidental.

In the original, a man called "the Time Traveler" shows off the titular invention to some guests and tells them successive stories of his disturbing adventures in the past future. The most trenchant part of the tale has to do with the releationship between the two peoples he meets on a journey far into the future, a relationship Wells plainly intended to have metaphorical implications for the social structure of his time.

But here, Simon Wells and screenwriterJohn Logan have made "The Time Machine" into the story of a lovably absent-minded professor in turn-of-the-century New York, Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce). Instead of H.G. Wells the visionary and social critic, we meet H.G. Wells, the adventure writer and romance novelist. There's a lengthy prologue that takes up almost 45 minutes before getting to where the book proper starts. And then it isn't even the book proper. It's a cheesy melodrama, complete with cute kid, love interest (played by the attractive Irish singer Samantha Mumba), and super-powered CGI monsters. (They suggest a cross between the durable creature from "Alien" and the thingie that William Hurt became when he messed around with his body chemicals in "Altered States.")

A personal tragedy (another invented plot point) induces Hartdegen to try his invention out, to see if he can change the past. Then he propels forward into the future. He eventually lands in the far future, year 802,701, where he discovers that humankind has evolved into two species: the Eloi, who live above the ground, and the Morlocks, who live underneath it. What's more, they have a "special" relationship.

The Pal movie tried to honor the pessimistic social theories Wells made central to his tale. He portrayed the Eloi as a flacid, flaxen-haired child-like people with no more ambition than a herd of sheep. His mercenary heir has them intelligent and industrious, and looking like an athletic tribe from the Amazon or Tahiti.

The two other major characters are entirely made up. One is Vox (Orlando Jones), a kind of encyclopedic hologram much like Robin Williams in "A.I."; the other is Jeremy Irons, a kind of uber-Morlock who suggests an albino knock-off of Howard Hughes, right down to the long fingernails.

As a standard-issue effects/action film, the new version is vaguely serviceable, a rung or two above last summer's abysmal "Planet of the Apes" remake. The only things this movie and the book have in common is a time traveler, the Eloi, the Morlock and the nasty secret concerning the two. Oh, and there's the time machine itself -- a marvel of wood, brass and crystal that pays homage to Pal's picture.

A movie doesn't have to slavishly follow every detail of the book on which it's based. But, imagine a movie based on "Lassie Come Home" in which Lassie ... doesn't. This "Time Machine" seems more like the next "Star Trek" movie, with Patrick Stewart doing the time warp. Sure enough, it turns out that Logan is the writer for "Star Trek: Nemesis," the next edition in the series; you have to wonder if what we see in "Time Machine" was a discarded first draft.

Aside from Hollywood greed and career-fodder for the younger Wells, there's no imaginable reason for this thing to exist. If only we could go back in time and pretend it was never made....

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution