Headscratchers / The Time Machine (1960)

• How were the air raid sirens still working after 800,000 years? If you're about to say "The Morlocks kept maintaining them", don't. No matter how many spare parts were in the shelter, they couldn't have had enough or 800,000 years worth of maintenance.
  • Why not? It's unknown technology from a future that never happened. Who's to say it couldn't survive? The Rings did. Failing that there is no reason why the Morlocks couldn't have made new ones if the old ones wore out.
  • They weren't 'still working', they were clearly shown to be broadcast out of the extensions from the Morlock temple-head. They continued making/replacing the sirens as needed, and continued conditioning the Eloi to follow it when it was dinner time. Making a specific sound is not particularly difficult, and the Morlocks are clearly intelligent enough to maintain farming/clothing manufacturing for the Eloi.
• Which three books would have been the best to help to restore a civilization?
  • Answering that question for yourself is rather the point. Which three books would you bring?
    • This was asked in the form of a casual write-in poll in the lobbies of the initial screening’s theatres. Virtually every respondent put down the Bible, non-Christians put down the Bible and their own holy books, and the others were simply all over.
  • Some books on basic engineering would be a practical choice.
• If our hero wants so much to see the wonders of a peaceful, progress-blessed future, why does he only stop to look around when something alters his immediate environment or rattles the Machine around? Of course he'll only see the worst and most chaotic of future events, if he's only checking out the times troubled enough to disturb his journey!
  • I'd guess that he assumed he'd have to go a long way into the future to find such a future but his curiosity is piqued by the disturbances.
  • He was initially just playing with his new toy and running around looking at shiny things that piqued his interest. He was just playing around watching the changing fashions, and stopped at a random time to go off for a jaunt to find out what had been happening - and happened to find out that the world was at war and his friend had died. If he hadn't run into Filby's son and found out about the war and his death, he presumably would have started investigating various events and whatnot in the fairly near future. But the war and Filby's death motivated him to simply rush headlong forward and try to find a spot where the world WASN'T at war.
• For what in-Verse reason do the Morlocks bother to make clothes for the Eloi? Sure, the Meta reason is that they couldn't have actors running around naked in a 1960 movie, but in-universe it seems like a lot of needless work and a waste of resources, considering the perfect climate that the surface apparently enjoys.
  • Possibly the Eloi retain a sense of social shame regarding nudity and they're easier to manage if the Morlocks provide clothes. Really a few weaving machines are not that big a drain on resources.
  • Because it is "how things are done?" Realize it has probably been thousands of years that this arraignment has been going on, and the original reasons may have been forgotten.
• The Morlocks provide the Eloi with food and clothing... but do they also cut their hair? Or have years of selective breeding just resulted in those pageboys on the Eloi men?
  • We shear sheep, and we even have competitions for the best styled llama and alpacas too. It isn't without precedent, and it adds a whole other layer of creepiness to keeping the Eloi as pets as well as livestock.