History Film / TheTimeMachine2002

The movie departs even further from the novel than [[Film/TheTimeMachine1960 the 1960 version]]. This time, the Time-Traveler is named Dr. Alexander Hartdegen (Creator/GuyPearce). He's an American in this version, [[FakeAmerican so naturally he's played by a British actor]]. Alex loves science and inventing things, but his friend David Philby (Mark Addy) knows that ScienceIsBad. After the death of his fiancée Emma (Sienna Guillory), Alex spends years building a TimeMachine so he can go back and prevent it. However, it turns out that YouCantFightFate, so he heads off for the future, hoping it'll hold the solution to his problem. In the year 2037, space colonists decide using nukes for mining is a brilliant idea and blow up the moon. Large chunks of the moon rain down on the Earth, knocking humanity back to the Stone Age. So clearly science is terrible.

The movie departs even further from the novel than [[Film/TheTimeMachine1960 the 1960 version]]. This time, the Time-Traveler is named Dr. Alexander Hartdegen. He's an American in this version, [[FakeAmerican so naturally he's played by a British actor]]. Alex loves science and inventing things, but his friend David Philby knows that ScienceIsBad. After the death of his fiancée Emma, Alex spends years building a TimeMachine so that he can go back and prevent it. However, it turns out that YouCantFightFate, so he heads off for the future, hoping it'll hold the solution to his problem. In the year 2037, space colonists decide using nukes for mining is a brilliant idea and blow up the moon. Large chunks of the moon rain down on the Earth, knocking humanity back to the Stone Age. So clearly science is terrible.

Alex arrives in the year 802701. In this version, the Eloi are portrayed as {{Magical Native American}}s, as opposed to their usual Greco-Roman vibe, and Weena's counterpart is named "Mara". After Alex gets to know her for awhile, Mara is kidnapped by the Morlocks. The other Eloi refuse to do anything about it, so Alex sets off to rescue her on his own. Within the Morlocks' underground lair, he meets the BigBad. The so-called "Uber-Morlock" answers Alex's original question. The answer, of course, is that he can't rescue Emma because that would create a TemporalParadox. Anyway, Alex causes his time machine to blow up and all the Morlocks die in a big explosion as he and Mara OutrunTheFireball. And so our man of science hero has learned that [[GreenAesop living in harmony with nature is awesome]] and settles down with Mara. The movie has actors like Creator/JeremyIrons.

* AndIMustScream: The Uber-Morlock ends up hanging onto the Time Machine but outside the bubble; he's forced to basically age to death ''in normal time'', unable to either let go of the machine or stop the process.
* AntiVillain: The Morlocks to a degree, though this loses in translation both the anti-war symbolism of the 1960 film and the class commentary in the original novel. As the Uber-Morlock explains, they were forced by circumstance to breed themselves into castes when it became apparent to their distant ancestors (i.e. the ones who went underground) that they couldn't return topside.

* BrainCriticalMass: The far future villain has a massive brain that extends down his back. He uses it to control the beasts that prey on the humans.
* ChekhovsGun: Hartdegen reaching out of the time bubble to catch his dropped pendant [[spoiler:and his hand rapidly aging while outside the bubble's protection]].

* DisposableWoman: The time-traveler's fiancée; he spent ''years'' building the time machine to change history and save her from dying. Two failed attempts are depicted, and then later we're told he tried to save her ''twenty-seven times''. She really does have no further character development than being destined to die.
* EternalEnglish: This time, they have their own language, but they still speak "the Stone Language" found on pieces of ruins of U.S. buildings. And the AI librarian (see WhoWantsToLiveForever below) likely fills the same role in maintaining early 21st-century American English pronunciation as the talking rings did in the 1960 film.
* EvilAlbino
* EvilOverlooker: [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6f/Time_machine.jpg/220px-Time_machine.jpg The poster.]]
* {{Fictionary}}: The Eloi have their own language that, oddly, sounds rather limited. The word tamquen seems to have several different connotations, as it's used several times in rapid succession at one point.
* FunnyBackgroundEvent: In the 2030 library, one of the extras (a woman scolding her son) can be heard to say "...or so help me I'll resequence your genome!"
* IChooseToStay
* {{Irony}}: Because Alexander created the machine for the purpose of saving his fiancee, that's the one thing that he can't use it to do.
* LargeHam: See below -- OneSceneWonder
* LostInImitation: This film seems to really be a rather loose [[TheRemake remake]] of the 1960 film, which itself was a somewhat loose adapation of Wells's novel, so you can imagine how little it resembles the book in any way.
** The film ''was'' directed by a direct descendant of HG Wells - great-grandson Simon Wells - so that could mitigate any dissonance in the adaptation.
* MyBrainIsBig: The Uber-Morlock--rather than have the usual huge head, his brain extended down the neck and lower back.

* TheLostLenore: The protagonist is now entirely motivated by the loss of his love, Emma.

** Alternatively, destroying a single Hive may not have done anything to change the BadFuture, as the Uber-Morlock told him there were many others. What's to stop the other Hives from expanding into the now-empty territory?
* PerfectPacifistPeople: Arguably, the Eloi are these, though {{Deconstructed}} since it makes them easy preys for the Morlocks.
** The 1960 version had an anti-war sentiment that was lost in this version, shown when an Eloi male says "It is all clear," a phrase he'd learned from the Talking Rings. In THIS version, however, the Eloi are pacifists because of the Uber-morlock's "psychic filter," which makes them forget about their dead and keeps them pacifistic. (Warning: this may have gotten lost in the cutting-room.)

* RagnarokProofing: Averted with the planet in general. After the moon disaster, any traces of civilization were pretty much obliterated over almost a million years.

* RecursiveCanon: Alex is offered a copy of HG Wells's "The Time Machine" in the future library.
* RemakeCameo: Besides the 1960 ''[[Film/TheTimeMachine1960 The Time Machine]]'', there had been two made-for-television movies based on Creator/HGWells' novella and Creator/AlanYoung is the only actor from any of the other three ''The Time Machine'' incarnations to appear.

** The irony is that Alexander has drawings in his lab that perfectly mirror the 2030's New York. Despite the fact that Alexander is a visionary, it was ultimately men like him that doomed the world.

* SpinningClockHands: The first sign Professor Hartdegen is travelling into the past is when the hands on his collection of pocket watches slow down, then reverse, speeding up as he travels further back.

* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: Given to the hero by the ''villain'' of all people.
--> '''Alexander''': This is a perversion of every natural law!
--> '''Uber-Morlock''': [[ArmourPiercingQuestion And what is time travel?]] But your pathetic attempt to control the entire world around '''you'''!
* TimeIsDangerous: The titular device creates a spherical bubble to protect the occupant. Reach outside, that protection no long applies. The main character hurts his hand when he instinctively grabs at an item he dropped. A Morlock wrestling with him on the machine ends up hanging outside the bubble, aging into dust. Logically, any attempt to reach outside the bubble should have violently scattered their atoms across dozens of years of history, but the RapidAging looked cooler, presumably.
** Or left the morlok standing there with no hands. Presumably, some atoms would be scattered as they are pushed out by the dissipating aura radiating off the time bubble.

* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: The Time Traveler stops off in the 2030s on his way to 802701.

* {{Weenalized}} (again)
* WhoWantsToLiveForever: The photonic library computer AI from 2030, who inexplicably manages to survive the apocalypse in an above-ground building which presumably has absolutely no protection from that sort of thing, and whose power and memory unit last literally hundreds of thousands of years. The fact that he remembers ''everything'' doesn't help. Leads to a bit of PetTheDog when he's given the opportunity to do the one thing he wants to do: teach.
* YouCantFightFate: Played straight and then possibly averted. The main character tries to save his girlfriend but every time, she gets killed; the chief Morlock later explains that the time machine cannot change the past in a way that prevents it from being built in the first place. Later in the movie, he goes to a BadFuture where the Morlocks have wiped out the Eloi, and then he goes back in time and wipes out the Morlocks. Either this means he successfully averted that bad future, or in the intervening several million years, the Morlocks from other areas will invade and wipe out the Eloi.
* YoungFutureFamousPeople: Referenced. Hartdegen is in touch with a bright young man from a Swiss patent office, one Mr. [[UsefulNotes/AlbertEinstein Einstein]].

* WhoWantsToLiveForever: The photonic library computer AI from 2030, who inexplicably manages to survive what is basically the apocalypse in an above-ground building which presumably has absolutely no protection from that sort of thing, and whose power and memory unit last literally hundreds of thousands of years. The fact that he remembers ''everything'' doesn't help. Leads to a bit of PetTheDog when he's given the opportunity to do the one thing he wants to do: teach.
* YouCantFightFate: Played straight and then possibly averted. The main character tries to save his girlfriend but every time, his girlfriend gets killed; the chief Morlock later explains that the time machine cannot change the past in a way that prevents it from being built in the first place. Later in the movie, he goes to a BadFuture where the Morlocks have wiped out the Eloi, and then he goes back in time and wipes out the Morlocks. Either this means he successfully averted that bad future, or in the intervening several million years, the Morlocks from other areas will invade and wipe out the Eloi.

* AndIMustScream: The Uber-Morlock ends up hanging onto the Time Machine but outside the bubble; he's forced to basically age to death ''in normal time'', unable to either let go of the machine or stop the process.

* RagnarokProofing: Averted with the planet in general. After the moon disaster, any traces of civilization were pretty much obliterated over almost a million years. Inexplicably played straight with the photonic library computer. His main processing unit survives orbital bombardment, the resulting thousands of centuries of neglect, and somehow end up ''underground'' on top of that. He even still has numerous functioning projection screens.

* RagnarokProofing: Averted with the planet in general. After the moon disaster, any traces of civilization were pretty much obliterated over millions of years. Inexplicably played straight with the photonic library computer. His main processing unit survives orbital bombardment, the resulting millions of years of neglect, and somehow end up ''underground'' on top of that. He even still has numerous functioning projection screens.

* SpellMyNameWithAThe: The Uber-Morlock's real name is apparently Jeremy Morlock. Heh.

* YoungFutureFamousPeople: Referenced. Hartdegen is in touch with a bright young man from a Swiss patent office, one Mr. [[UsefulNotes/AlbertEinstein Einstein]].

* HeyItsThatGuy: [[MadTv Orlando Jones]] plays the futuristic library's A.I. system.
** And Creator/AlanYoung, the original Filby, as the flower-shop salesman. Apparently he even found the Victorian-style collar he wore in the 1960 version!

* TimeyWimeyBall: He can't go back and save his girlfriend because then he'd have no reason to go back and save her. Then at the end of the film he goes to a bad future, then goes back in time and prevents it which he can do because... ?
** He couldn't save his girlfriend because it would remove his reason for creating the time machine, but could stop that future from occurring because he was just observing it.
*** But remember that he wouldn't be able to observe it in the future if he prevented it from happening in the first place. The same effect, only the other way round.
**** Ah, but! Saving his fiancée in the past would be an action that affects his present. Observing one possible future where he is a temporal outsider, then going back a bit before that to change it is a different thing entirely. He can't change his past, but he can change the future. If his fiancée hadn't died, he wouldn't have built the time machine or used it like he did, so she would've died, so he would've saved her, so she would've died, and so on. Paradox. However, once he has access to the time machine he's free to travel to the future, see how it goes, then travel back and change it in whatever way he wishes so long as it doesn't affect anything that happened to him before he first turned on the time machine. Everything before he activated the time machine is immutable because if things were different, the time machine wouldn't have come to exist. Everything after that is free game because nothing in the future is essential to the creation and operation of the machine.
** Although FridgeHorror sets in when you realise that without the Uber-Morlock's influence, he states that the Morlocks would exhaust the food supply in a matter of months... which looks very much the Morlock-Future Alexander found himself in. And we know they have ''other'' colonies. [[invoked]]
*** But then he fixed it all with a big time explosion. Time explosions are special; they can destroy all Morlock colonies simultaneously without affecting the geology enough to dislodge the precious Eloi towns precariously stuck to the sides of precipices. Time explosions are funny that way.

* ForeignRemake: The film moves the setting from London to New York.

* MyBrainIsBig: The Uber-Morlock -- rather than have the usual huge head, his brain extended down the neck and lower back.
* NamedByTheAdaptation: Alexander Hartdegen, the time traveller.

* RidiculouslyHumanRobots: The photonic library computer. The computer even gets visibly irritated at what he regards as stupid questions from the Time Traveller, when a real computer would simply and happily attempt to answer any of his inquiries regardless of what was asked. This means that for whatever reason creators gave him the same flaws as a human librarian would have, even though there was no reason for it and would actually hinder his performance as a library computer.

**** Ah, but! Saving his fiancée in the past would be an action that affects his present. Observing one possible future where he is a temporal outsider, then going back a bit before that to change it is a different thing entirely. He can't change his past, but he can change the future. If his fiancée hadn't died, he wouldn't have built the time machine or used it like he did, so she would've died, so he would've saved her, so she would've died etcetera. Paradox. However, once he has access to the time machine he's free to travel to the future, see how it goes, then travel back and change it in whatever way he wishes so long as it doesn't affect anything that happened to him before he first turned on the time machine. Everything before he activated the time machine is immutable because if things were different, the time machine wouldn't have come to exist. Everything after that is free game because nothing in the future is essential to the creation and operation of the machine.

* YouCantFightFate: Played straight and then possibly averted. The main character tries to save his girlfriend but every time, his girlfriend gets killed; the chief Morlock later explains that the time machine cannot change the past in a way that prevents it from being built in the first place. Later in the movie, he goes to a BadFuture where the Morlocks have wiped out the Eloi, and then he goes back in time and wipes out the Morlocks. Either this means he sucessfully averted that bad future, or in the intervening several million years, the Morlocks from other areas will invade and wipe out the Eloi.

* {{Americanitis}}: The film moves the setting from London to New York.

Alex arrives in the year 802701. In this version, the Eloi are portrayed as {{Magical Native American}}s, as opposed to their usual Greco-Roman vibe, and Weena's counterpart is named "Mara". After Alex gets to know her for awhile, Mara is kidnapped by the Morlocks. The other Eloi refuse to do anything about it, so Alex sets off to rescue her on his own. Within the Morlocks' underground lair, he meets the BigBad. The so-called "Uber-Morlock" answers Alex's original question. The answer, of course, is that he can't rescue Emma because that would create a TemporalParadox. Anyway, Alex causes his time machine to blow up and all the Morlocks die in a big explosion as he and Mara OutrunTheFireball. And so our man of science hero has learned that [[GreenAesop living in harmony with nature is awesome]] and settles down with Mara.

'''Tropes from the 2002 film version which weren't in the book:'''

* ForeignRemake: The film moves the setting from London to New York.

* {{Americanitis}}: The film moves the setting from London to New York.

** And Alan Young, the original Filby, as the flower-shop salesman. Apparently he even found the Victorian-style collar he wore in the 1960 version!

Alex arrives in the year 803701. In this version, the Eloi are portrayed as {{Magical Native American}}s, as opposed to their usual Greco-Roman vibe, and Weena's counterpart is named "Mara". After Alex gets to know her for awhile, Mara is kidnapped by the Morlocks. The other Eloi refuse to do anything about it, so Alex sets off to rescue her on his own. Within the Morlocks' underground lair, he meets the BigBad. The so-called "Uber-Morlock" answers Alex's original question. The answer, of course, is that he can't rescue Emma because that would create a TemporalParadox. Anyway, Alex causes his time machine to blow up and all the Morlocks die in a big explosion as he and Mara OutrunTheFireball. And so our man of science hero has learned that [[GreenAesop living in harmony with nature is awesome]] and settles down with Mara.

'''''The Time Machine''''' is a 2002 film adaptation by Simon Wells of the science fiction novel ''Literature/TheTimeMachine'' by his grandfather Creator/HGWells.

* YoungFutureFamousPeople: Referenced. Hartdegen is in touch with a bright young man from a Swiss patent office, one Mr. [[UsefulNotes/AlbertEinstein Einstein]].

* OneSceneWonder: As with ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact'', the Morlocks were given a leader that had not existed previously, in order to explain what was going on those unfamiliar with the source material. Played [[HamAndCheese with a side of cheese]] by JeremyIrons.

* FridgeHorror: Vox spent thousands of years alone in the underground ruins completely alone, save for one Eloi who managed to escape the Morlocks. We then see that the Eloi died of old age and until Alex showed up, Vox was probably going to spend eternity in the same room as his only friend's corpse, all the while unable to bury him.
* FridgeLogic: If the Morlocks can no longer go in the sunlight, how come the raiding party took place in the middle of the day? The only explanation is that the Uber-Morlocks as albinos aren't capable of returning to the surface and they're keeping the other castes underground ''on purpose''.

** Although FridgeHorror sets in when you realise that without the Uber-Morlock's influence, he states that the Morlocks would exhaust the food supply in a matter of months... which looks very much the Morlock-Future Alexander found himself in. And we know they have ''other'' colonies.