Review/Comment: The Time Machine (1960)

Most agree that George Pal’s 1960 version of The Time Machine is a good film and there’s no question that much of it (design work, period feel, dramatic narrative) is excellent. So I preface what I have to say now by remarking that I think its reputation is well deserved.

However, despite its virtues, the film has always disappointed me somewhat. This is because Wells’ original is one of the great SF stories and Pal’s film pretty well subverts its themes in every way.

True, the look and feel of the beginning is spot on. For a start it’s set in the correct time period (unlike the misguided 2002 “update”, directed by the author’s great-grandson, Simon). The design of Pal’s Machine is wonderful. But the politics have been utterly turned on their head. As with Wells’ equally iconic novel War of the Worlds, I’ve waited for someone to do the story with a degree of faithfulness to Wells’ intent — and I’m still waiting… though I did think that Spielberg’s much-castigated War of the Worlds got closer than most (in some ways), despite various daft additions — but that’s another story…

Back to The Time Machine:

In Wells’ novel, of course, the “beautiful people” (the Eloi) turn out to be, literally, cattle; they cannot be “saved” by an outsider’s heroic actions because they have ceased to be human as thoroughly as have the Morlocks. This realisation is one of the most powerful moments in SF history. In fact, the book tells us, Morlocks are, in many ways, all that is left of humanity as a “organised” species — not the Eloi, who are the real sub-humans: without aspiration, social organisation or a willingness to fight for the right to govern their own fate. The film disappointed me because it became a standard narrative of “heroic outsider manages to lead a rebellion against the forces of evil and (by inference at least) rescue the oppressed beautiful people from thousands of years of historic development” — something that has been as unrealistically done a squillion times and is way too glib to satisfy Wells’ enquiry into Man’s social evolution.

Wells was an optimistic man, at this stage of his career anyway, but he tried to drive home the significance for the future of how we act now by undercutting the easy options and leaving Mankind in darkness in this potential future. The final image in the book, the very distant future (a decimated Earth under a bleached-out dying sun, a mutated crab scuttling along the beach the only sign of life), symbolically places humanity in the scheme of things — and more powerfully emphasises the moral responsibilities we have in the here-and-now than any glib “salvation” could possibly do.

OK, a film of The Time Machine that tried to accurately reflect Wells’ themes would not be comforting and probably not very popular. But Art isn’t meant to offer easy options, even if the box office demands them.