This movie is...odd.

The story in itself has a good basis, a men suffers the death of her beloved then builds a time machine to try and fix it

the problem is that the film has an odd way of telling the story and the pacing felt strange.

This movie is 1 hour and a half, which was normal for the 00's but these days movies usually are 2 hours long, i feel like this movie would have greatly benefitted having 30 more minutes to it

the first part of the movie feels really rushed, the death of the girl, the construction of the time machine and the realization that "i cannot change the past" all happen in like 5 minutes of the movie.

One scene the machine is just a couple of numbers on a whiteboard, one minute later it's done and working

he literally tries to save the girl a single time in the movie and he is instantly convinced that he can't change the past, i feel like i would have tried just a bunch more

After that he goes to the future, the sequence at the library with the AI felt really clunky and just far from reality, but this was the 00's concept of the future i guess so i can't really complain about it

the fact that 800 thousand years in the future the only thing that really changed is where the soil is just funny, yes they tell us that humanity has evolved in 2 branches, one of slaves and ones of weird cannibal monsters, but that seems just silly. 800k years of evolution would probably do a bit more than that

i would also expect plants to be different, and animals too, only chameleons and bats are shown but still it feels odd.

At the end of the movie the protagonist is told 2 really important informations:

1) you can't change the past. if you were to change an event that means that you would not create time travel to change that event, which means that you would not travel back to change it, which means it would change. And if it didn't change, you would create time travel and so on and so forth. So changing the past is impossible because it would put you in an endless loop, cool

2) alexander travels to the future (like 635 MILLION YEARS MORE into the future holy crap) and notices that the cannibal monsters have transformed the earth in a wasteland.

given these informations, he goes back to the 800k something (so in the "future present") and destroys his machine to also destroy the monsters and save the "human slaves"

which really does nothing, since as we know changing the past doesn't change the future so the monsters will still end up ruling over the earth somehow but i guess it does help his tribe to live a happier life, since they won't need to worry about the monsters anymore.

So when the movie ends, he stays in the future with this new girl he met (which felt just really wrong, since this whole journey started because he wanted to save "the love of his life" at any cost) and that's it

It's not that bad of a movie honestly, I somewhat enjoyed it, it just felt quite rushed in many parts and the story doesn't really make sense to me in many ways (why stay in a primitive future? why even bother to change something that it's going to happen 635 million years in the future? why literally nothing evolved except a branch of humans? i could go on but you get the point)

Some interesting and even ambitious aspects but this sci-fi thriller was pretty uneven while the visual effects were also a mixed bag from being fairly impressive for its time (20 years now) to pretty shoddy. On the plus side, Guy Pearce was good in the lead. This one also reminded me when Orlando Jones was in a good amount of movies (18 between 1998-2004). IDK, this is one that did keep me entertained. **3.0/5**

I don't know how to approach this one.

"The Time Machine" is one of those stories that, rereading it, beings back vivid memories. One of my best friends in high school loaned it to me, I stored it away in my backpack for about a month and then...when we had a field trip to The Board of Trade, I scrounged it out and read it on the train ride.

It was one of those stories that is so short I could rip through it in the hour and fifteen minutes between our small town and Chicago. To this day, every time I go back to it, it brings me back to 1997 and, to this day, I distinctly remember finishing it about the time the train stopped and I remember walking into the crowded city feeling like I was in a different world. The story had moved me out of reality so much Chicago seemed jarring.

And then they made it into a movie, a remake of a movie and, watching it, I don't know, I didn't have that same sense of being in a totally different world that the book gave me...

And the movie, in my mind, has to live up to that experience in some small way. Or at least give you that feeling that same feeling that the world was still spinning that one gets when they walk out of a movie and discover that it had rained.

It's an engrossing story and The Time Machine didn't seem to whisk me away like the book did. I can't help but feel it deserved better.

It felt like I was watching a movie and, honestly, it gave me the same since that Jackson's King Kong did, it felt like it was trying and horribly, miserably failed.

I left feeling "meh," and that was after being excited walking into it, I mean, I read it in 1997 and they made a movie in 2002 and, I was expecting the same feeling. I had waited long enough.

So, I don't know, I may be overly harsh on it just because I loved what the story did to me so much, the first time I read it and now, as an adult, it doesn't take me to another world, it takes me back to 1997 again, and high school, and that hour fifteen minute train ride to Chicago.

So ultimately, it could be a halfway decent film that I just hate because the story had such a jarring effect on me when I first encountered it.