There was a point when I was between the ages of, say, 13-14 when my favorite movie was 1953’s The War of the Worlds. Produced by George Pal, a guy known for a lot of special effects-driven movies of that era, I would rewatch that movie again and again, feeling the same thrills every time. I would go on to read and enjoy H.G Wells’s original novel, and I even recognized the lead actors from that movie from their silent blink-and-you-miss-them cameos at the end of Steven Spielberg’s version of that story.
But it turns out Pal actually directed a film version of another great Wells sci-fi novel, namely The Time Machine. Hopefully I would enjoy that one just as much.
The film starts off fairly faithful to the original novel–yes, I’ve read that one too–as a group of well-to-do gentlemen come to a friend’s house, only to have said friend stumble in, his clothes ripped and his body battered for some reason. He is H. George Wells (Rod Taylor), and he will tell his friends what happened, how he invented a time machine, and how he went into the future. He eventually comes to a point in the distant future to find that humanity has split into two distinct races: the above-ground, childish Eloi; and the underground, savage Morlocks. Wells loses his machine and finds something like love with the Eloi woman Weena (Yvette Mimieux), and opts to defend her and her people from the Morlocks, at least until he can get his time machine back.
Now, I did say this movie started off fairly faithfully, but Pal’s movie does have a few advantages coming along years after the original story, namely the ability for his time traveler to see some sights that happened between the period when Wells wrote his novel and the movie was made, allowing the character to react to two world wars and the possibility of atomic war. That all fits in with the character who is largely impressed with humanity’s resilience and its ability to rebuild after tragedy. If anything, it also shows his extreme annoyance with the Eloi, beings who care nothing for rebuilding or even trying to help each other when one among them is drowning, fits very much with his character. For a man who lives for learning, finding people who treat even other members of their kind in distress with general apathy would be enough to anger the otherwise stoic time traveler.
Worth noting that Pal is known for a lot of his special effects work. That can always be difficult to judge for a movie this old, but what is on display is at least up to a big budget standard for 1960. The way the city grows around the machine as it moves forward largely works, and I am even willing to overlook how the movie suggests an atomic blast going off in the city somehow leaves the time traveler and his machine unharmed while it destroys the model representations of everything around them. That said, there’s also some blatant stock footage that didn’t work. I’ve enjoyed Pal’s movies in the past and never has cause to say much about the special effects before, but there were some obvious models and stock footage that knocked me out of the movie a bit. It wasn’t much, but it was still noteworthy.
On a final note, Wells the author often worked his somewhat radical for his time politics into his work. He went out of his way to explain the Eloi were descended from the wealthy and the Morlocks from the workers. This movie doesn’t quite go that far, only having one Eloi say the Morlocks provide everything for them. A message like that may not go over too well during the Cold War given its socialist underpinnings, so here it is presented more as dumb luck depending on where someone’s ancestors went to ride out a long war: the Eloi’s ancestors chose one place while the Morlocks’ went underground. The Eloi may be vapid and apathetic, but at least they still look human and don’t eat each other. The Morlocks are just depicted as monsters. That’s understandable for a movie like this and an easy interpretation of the novel, but it also means the the more nuanced origin for the Morlocks is lost, making a more deliberate act for their creation more like some sort of dumb luck. I don’t really mind that for a movie, but I was curious to see if the film would keep that idea going. Not really, but it’s still a fine movie all the same.
Grade: B+
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