I give this film a 10/10 for personal reasons, though I think an average score of 5.9/10 is an awful joke. It goes to show the mainstream are as often wrong as they are right. The Time Machine has everything I love in a movie: existentialism, loss, abstract symbolism and reflection, mystical fantasy of the serious kind, bold adventure and traveling to the far-far reaches of the future, a beautiful and passionate main character, a powerful lesson learned in the end, and easily one of the best soundtracks I have ever heard. Listen to halfway through Stone Language. This movie itself is up there with Mulholland Dr.

If I had a choice to give this a zero I would. It is so badly flawed I almost don't know where to start. It appears that someone thought it would be a good idea to have the Grandson of HG Wells direct this nag. He obviously has no idea how to direct. It is as bad a job as when Stephan King directed Maximum Overdrive and did not understand screen direction. Great writer...bad director. Same here. This movie was so disjointed and had so many story ideas running through it that you had to have a road map to find your way around. The original story line was lost along the way as the plot meandered seemingly aimlessly from one inane sequence to the next. So many holes.....and the audience is without shovels.

The original version is my seventh favourite film of all time. While this film is nowhere near as good as its predecessor, it is also nowhere near as bad as it is made out to be. It rollicks along at a great pace and is enormous fun from start to finish. The film is well directed by H.G. Wells' great-grandson Simon Wells and Gore Verbinski, who replaced him for the last 18 days of the shoot as he was suffering from exhaustion. I don't know who directed what scenes so I can't really get specific in my critique but I will say that the direction seemed perfectly consistent. When it comes to the writing, there are a few plot holes but none of them impacted on my enjoyment of the film.Guy Pearce is a very good lead as the time traveller Alexander Hartdegen, even if the character's journey from an eccentric professor to an action hero over the course of a few days - relatively speaking - is a little hard to believe. Samantha Mumba is very natural as his Eloi love interest Mara. One thing that she does very well is deliver the Eloi dialogue as if it were an actual language. The same is true of her real life younger brother Omero as Kalen. He is quite good in the role but, perhaps unsurprisingly, he is at his best in his scenes with his sister. Their chemistry comes through very clearly, particularly in the scene when she comforts him after his nightmare. Jeremy Irons is suitably creepy in his cameo as the Über-Morlock and the film has three strong supporting actors in Mark Addy, Orlando Jones and Phyllida Law. Sienna Guillory is the weakest link but she has only a small role so that's okay. I loved Alan Young's "blink and you'll miss it" appearance as the florist! I have actually met both Irons and Samantha Mumba and they're both very nice.When it comes to the Eloi and the Morlocks, the film largely lacks the novel and the 1960 film's social commentary but the fact that none of the Eloi are white may have been intended as a commentary on the way that ethnic minorities are and were mistreated, as in the "Planet of the Apes" films. The first of those is referenced to the Morlocks' hunting of the Eloi. Speaking of which, I loved the design of the Spy Morlocks but I wasn't too gone on that of the Hunter Morlocks. The Über-Morlock's was very good except for his brain stretching down his back, which I thought was a bit silly. The time machine itself is a beautiful design but you can't beat the 1960 version. The CGI was very impressive for its time and the time travel effects are one of the highlights of the film. There are some lovely references to the original film, my favourite being the Über-Morlock aging rapidly and eventually crumbling to dust when outside the machine's temporal bubble. Not sure what the point of relocating the action to New York was though, especially since Jones is the only major American cast member. Incidentally, Alexander's first future pit-stop is May 24, 2030, which will be my 43rd birthday! Overall, the film is a very enjoyable film which is very good as remakes go. I wish that "Planet of the Apes" (2001), a remake of my sixth favourite film of all time, or "Star Trek: Nemesis", another 2002 film written by John Logan, were as much fun as this.

Well, that was a waste of time. Having finally got to see the Guy Pearce version of The Time Machine I can honestly say I wish I hadn't bothered. The Rod Taylor original didn't follow the book totally but this one just seemed to throw the book in the bin. Instead of a man tired of the inevitability of war we have a 'hero' who is obsessed by his failure to save his girlfriend from dying. Having travelled into the past several times to try and save her he now decides to travel to the future where he finds the beautiful Eloi menaced by the dreadful Morlocks and that's where the similarities end. For a film that was made 42 years after its illustrious predecessor, it seems even less scientifically accurate. If the Moon had broken up lie was shown in the book, it would have exceeded Roche's limit and most probably hit the Earth with catastrophic effects. The Morloks were shown to be mindless beasts ruled by a man who wouldn't have been out of place in a Die Hard movie. Jeremy Irons should have been ashamed to appear in this film. Just how was the Uber Morlock supposed to have come into being? I won't even dwell upon the overt racism in this film but just suppose they had done it the other way? Put all that together with Pearce's totally characterless performance and this film is nothing more than a sombre mess. The only saving grace was Samantha Mumba who at least tried to inject some humanity into her role.