Last Saturday, our hero had entered the Morlocks’ lair to save Mara. This rescue attempt turned out pretty much like the attempt in the 1960 film adaptation of 1895 novella. The traveler is not very good at sneaking around and is discovered almost right away.

The traveler as a fish out of water

One thing that bothers me about both film adaptations is that neither one does a very good job of capturing how out of place the time traveler feels in the future. In H.G. Wells’s novella, this sense is portrayed through his superior brain and physicality. I’m not a fan of Darwinian theory, but I understand the idea that Wells was going for — the sense that the traveler was a relic from a forgotten time. He is in many ways an alien, and his abilities and talents are totally unknown to both the Eloi and the Morlocks. Narratively, this helps readers make sense of the story because it explains how he is able to survive his hostile encounter with Morlocks, despite the fact that he is outnumbered. It also explains why the traveler is so eager to return to his own time. He doesn’t belong in the future, and he knows it.

The Time Machine is in some ways a fish out-of-water story. I know that the screenwriters for both films had their reasons for diminishing the contrast. But I wish they had found some way to capture that sense of isolation portrayed in the book.

And now for the merciful villain

Before being captured, the traveler realizes that the Morlocks are cannibals. The way he finds out feels a little irritating. He comes across a pile of clothing and finds Mara’s necklace. Then he sees some meat hooks and naturally fears the worst. But when he’s captured, he sees Mara in a cage, unharmed. So why did the Morlocks remove her necklace? This is another tiny detail that communicates that the writers didn’t pay close attention to their script.

Anyway, the traveler is thrown into a lower chamber where he finds Mara. But then he sees someone else, and, for me, this was the highlight of the movie. The 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine is a horrible film. But Jeremy Irons, who played the Uber-Morlock, was a joy to watch. To quote Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka, “So shines a good deed in a weary world.” Jeremy Irons’ inclusion in this movie is nothing short of a providential act of charity for the audience.

Speaking of charity, this is the single most merciful villain I’ve ever seen. The Uber-Morlock is an interesting character and deserves a film to himself.

Don’t misunderstand, he doesn’t feature in H.G. Wells’s book at all. His powers are idiotic within the context of the story. But had this character been used somewhere else, he would’ve been a very, very compelling villain, powers and all. I’ll deal with the poor aspects of the character first, but remember these aspects are only issues because of the story the character has been placed in.

The new version of the Morlocks

The most glaring problem is that the Uber-Morlock has psychic powers. How living underground would give humanity psychic powers I have no idea. But somehow natural selection has transcended physical matter and entered the realm of the mind.

Secondly, in this version of the Time Machine story, the Morlocks have bred themselves into castes. Some hunt, some work, and some lead the hordes with their psychic abilities.

Like the changes that make the Eloi self-sufficient, this change completely undermines the point Wells was trying to make. His idea was that the process of natural selection, if left unaltered or unchecked, would eventually lead to a devolution, a decline. Life would return to the primordial soup because life can’t stop eating itself. The original Time Machine was supposed to be a cautionary tale. By giving the Morlocks abilities humans don’t possess, the writers here imply that evolution is still moving forward, even if its current manifestation is macabre.

This change undermines not only Wells’s original intent but the message of the story as a whole, which is basically that mankind better shape up, or a horrible fate awaits it. Even the 1960s adaptation understood this message. Those writers moved the cautionary aspect of the tale from evolution to the Cold War but they did not eliminate it.

An intriguing part of the Uber-Morlock’s character is that he seems almost sad that he is a cannibal. But, like the Eloi, he is resigned to his fate. He isn’t particularly malicious; he just believes that the current state of things is necessary and has decided to play his role. I wouldn’t say I found this villain sympathetic, but he is a monster that can be reasoned with, a creature who could be presented with a choice. In short, the writers should’ve done more with this character, but they wasted their opportunity. I think the writers were too busy trying to form a message out of their tangled mess of a story to give the character more development, and what they attempted to do was less than satisfactory.

The traveler is presented with a stark reality

Again, as with the Eloi, the time traveler is being presented with a choice to either accept or reject his fate. Should he fight to save Emma or just accept that she’s gone? The Uber-Morlock gives the traveler a vision of his life with Emma, then tells him that this life is impossible because if she hadn’t died, he never would’ve built the time machines. So how could he return to the past to save her?

I’ve complained about time paradoxes before, so I won’t repeat myself here. Suffice it to say, there might’ve been a way to make this resolution work. But the driving question of the entire movie was saving Emma. And it is a problem that the writers of the 2002 film wrote into the story themselves. Yet now they address it with a single throwaway line. That was possibly the worst way they could’ve dealt with the paradox, short of not dealing with it at all.

And on top of that, the Uber-Morlock who reveals the problem is the antagonist, the bad guy. He isn’t just the physical opponent; he’s the direct challenge to the protagonist’s ideology. So, if this protagonist must defeat his antagonist right after an ideological challenge, then the conclusion this protagonist is probably going to infer is that he’s right to try and change fate. This was a horrible way to deal with the time traveler’s problem — a problem that shouldn’t have been included in this story in the first place!

We’ll cover the conclusion of The Time Machine (2002) next Saturday.

Here are the four earlier portions of my review of the 2002 film:

Part 1: Review: Time Machine (2002) – Wells’s tale gets an unneeded makeover. This doesn’t even seem like the same story as H.G. Wells’s nineteenth-century tale! But there’s still a time machine, Eloi and Morlocks here, so let’s look at it anyway. In this film, the time traveler has a girlfriend whom he is trying to save from death. But can time travel really alter the course of events?

Part 2: Review: Time Machine (2002) — Hold on. Someone’s destroyed the Moon. Part 2: The Eloi we meet in this film are radically different from H.G. Wells’s Eloi and that of the 1960 film version. By making the Eloi more hearty and capable of surviving on their own, the writers destroy the seriousness of the threat the Morlocks represent.

Time Machine (2002) — A Gordian knot of freshman philosophy. In Part 3 of my extended review, I look at the film’s effort to tease apart the philosophy of fighting vs, accepting one’s fate. Good and bad writing are on a spectrum. Underlying this spectrum is the suspension of disbelief. That is, viewers should forget where they are while watching.

and

Review: Time Machine (2002) — Hold on again. That snarky AI returns. In Part 4 of my review, we look at plot devices and holes. How DID that AI survive the destruction of New York? The time traveler, good-natured gentleman that he is, ignores the hologram’s snootiness and continues asking urgent questions.