History Film / TheTimeMachine2002

* AnAesop: Accept the things you cannot change, and move on, no matter how painful it is.

* DeadpanSnarker: Vox is the only snarky character in the whole movie.

* ColdHam: The Uuml;ber-Morlock is much more composed and subdued compared to his underlings, and hardly raises his voice. Yet he easily steals every scene he's in.

* Foreshadowing:

* DayHurtsDarkAdjustedEyes: After centuries of living underground, the Morlocks eventually tried to live outside their underground caves, but were unable to adjust to the sunlight. This is what drove them to become a hunting species to feed off of the Eloi above.

* FashionsNeverChange: Subverted in that the Eloi and Morlocks' clothing are fitting of a ScavengerWorld. Also averted, as with the 1960 version, with the fashion shop mannequin briefly seen during the first time travel sequence depicting the changing fashions throughout the first half and a bit of the 20th century.

* TragicTimeTraveler: Physician Alexander Hartdegen creates a time machine in order to save his fiancee from being killed by a mugger. He succeeds... and then she ends up dying by being ran over by an automobile. It's eventually revealed that [[spoiler:he has tried multiple times to save her, only for her to die in another, unforeseen way. To add insult to injury, the Morlocks explain that this is because she's the basis for him creating the time machine, ergo, if he ends up saving her, then he doesn't have the need to build the time machine, and the edited past gets erased]].

[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the_time_machine_2000.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:300:0 to 800,000 years in 1.2 seconds.]]

* FamousFamousFictional: The original ''Time Machine'' novel, the 1960 version, and a fictional Creator/AndrewLloydWebber musical adaptation, when Vox the virtual librarian lists iterations of the original time-travel plot this movie is taken from.

* BareYourMidriff: Mara's outfit, reveals her midriff due to the Eloi devolving into more tribal cultures and adapting to nature.

* AdaptationNameChange: Weena has been renamed Mara. Granted, Weena and Mara don't have much in common other than being the Time-Traveler's Eloi companion, so Mara can also be thought of as a separate character rather than the same character with a different name.

* AnachronismStew: In the opening, it's passingly mentioned that Alex is corresponding with a German patent clerk named Einstein. The film opens in 1899. Albert Einstein, while a brilliant university student, didn't get his job as a patent clerk until 1902.

* AdaptationNameChange: Weena has been renamed Mara. Granted, Weena and Mara don't have much in common other than being the Time-Traveler's female Eloi companion, so Mara can also be thought of as a separate character rather than the same character with a different name.

* DisposableWoman: Emma. Alex spent ''four years'' building his time machine to change history and save her from dying. When it fails, he contemplates how he could try ''a thousand times'' without success. She really does have no further CharacterDevelopment than being destined to die.
* EmergencyTemporalShift: After the cataclysm of the moon breaking up in 2037 Alex scrambles back into his machine and just keeps going forward to evade it, but as he's immediately knocked out he didn't get to stop it again until he comes to and pauses it in 802701. He later also does this to escape from or get rid of the Über-Morlock—apparently there he'd floored the time lever so hard he's flung 635 million years forward in the space of minutes.

* MightyWhitey: The film (probably inadvertently) has this effect by the Eloi all being AmbiguouslyBrown with Alex being the WhiteMaleLead, him rescuing them from the evil Morlocks who prey upon them, which they can't do (having been culled to stop any resistance). Sure enough, he's soon getting close with one of their women, Mara, and sacrifices his time machine to protect them, happily staying with the Eloi.

* SquishyWizard: Averted HARD. Anyone who expected the Über-Morlock to be physically weak because his caste had focused on developing their psychic powers was in for a surprise.

* LostInImitation: Despite being directed by Wells' own great-grandson, this film ultimately seems to be a loose [[TheRemake remake]] of the 1960 film, which itself was a somewhat loose adaptation of the novel. The ending credits outright admit it with the (buried) credit, "based on the screenplay by David Duncan," who was the writer of the 1960 version. Most tellingly, the film includes numerous elements from the 1960 film, even hitting most of the same story beats, but doesn't really include anything from the book unless it's via the 1960 film. For instance, the DetonationMoon disaster is not taken from anything in the novel, but it does fill the same plot function as WorldWarIII in the 1960 film. Likewise, Vox has no book counterpart, but he is clearly equivalent to the talking rings from the 1960 version. There are also some elements that might have been borrowed from the [[Film/TheTimeMachine1978 1978 TV version]].

* DisposableWoman: Emma. Alex 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 CharacterDevelopment than being destined to die.

* AdaptationNameChange: Weena has been renamed Mara. Granted, Weena and Mara don't have much in common other than being the Time-Traveler's female Eloi companion, so Mara can also be thought of as a replacement character rather than the same character with a different name.