Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

That question is only one of many intriguing philosophical amusements we’re left with after the time-traveling experience of this 1960 cult classic of science fiction thrillers, the George Pal-directed The Time Machine. If you’ve enjoyed another original, The Planet of the Apes, with its similar theme of traveling into the future and all of the emotional trauma that produces, then you shall also surely revel in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, based on his nineteenth century novel of the same name.

Before we can appreciate the many questions titillating our minds of the drama of traveling through time, it is prudent to first describe how very natural and believable the experience becomes in the skilled hands of George Pal, David Duncan as screenwriter, Paul Vogel as cinematographer, Gene Warren, Tim Barr and Wah Chung as the Oscar-winning Special Effects team and Russell Garcia with his futuristic, mainly acoustical Music Score.

Rod Taylor, as our movie’s hero, George “H.G.” Wells, effortlessly sells the story to us in his first and finest major role. He also starred in Hitchcock’s The Birds, but he didn’t carry that thriller as well as this one, in my opinion.

As The Time Machine opens, myriads of nineteenth-century clocks are ticking as several scientific colleagues and a good friend of George’s await him around the dinner table at his stately house in turn-of-last century London. Abruptly the kitchen door swings open and it is a disheveled George. Back from the future!

After catching his breath and gulping some kind of spirits, the inventor begins his tale, reminding them (and showing us in flashback) of the discussion they had five days ago (December 31, 1899) of time as the fourth dimension and his demonstration of a toy time machine model that disappeared when instructed to “leap” into the future. In voice over he narrates his thoughts as he privately tries out the bigger model in his lab. After just a few seconds of pushing the crystal-laden throttle and stopping, he notices clues of having gone forward a couple hours in time.

Then in jubilant relief he realizes that it works and pushes the throttle forward a little more and more until the skylight above reveals sunsets, night skies, moons, sunrises and suns dancing above him in rapid succession using unique camera work, the potted flowers in the lab bursting through their life cycles in mere seconds (but four or five hours to animate), a snail zipping across the floor and a store mannequin being dressed and undressed in women’s fashions through many decades.

His first stop is in 1917 and he finds himself in a cobweb-covered house covered in dust and boarded up. After meeting his friend’s son on the street in uniform and discovering his friend’s death and the country being at war, he sadly starts time traveling again. The next time he stops in 1940 because the sled-like machine is rocking. When he barely misses being hit by a bomb and his house vanishes around him, he travels to 1966, the future when this was released in 1960. He meets his friend’s elderly son now as he and others flee to a bomb shelter. The last siren wails and George, all alone now, suddenly witnesses the devastation of a nuclear attack, earthquakes, fire, volcanos erupting.

Walled in by a mountain he manages to speed through the thousands of centuries until it falls down and frees him again. In 801,705 he stops for the last time because the world has become a veritable Garden of Eden. He soon finds the simple, barefoot people, the Eloi, who inhabit the garden are at the mercy of a cannibalistic race of ape-like creatures living underground. They steal his machine, but he cannot save it and also the Eloi, notably a pretty woman played by Yvette Mimieux, from the Morlocks…or can he?

Watch and enjoy the adventure!


Comments

This movie really sets my mind racing and imagination soaring! I have no qualms about ignoring the new version of this movie. How could they improve on the dashing, expressive Rod Taylor, sweet, admiring Yvette Mimieux (paired again with Taylor in Dark of the Sun) and lovable, concerned Alan Young as Filby, his friend and friend’s son? You might remember him from the hit TV show, Mr. Ed.

I don’t think anyone could complain about the jewel-like time machine with a Victorian chair, fiberglass disk that whirls and a crystal-heavy lever. In the 1993 documentary, The Time Machine: The Journey Back, forty-eight minutes which follow the 108 minute movie, we learn how it was designed by George Pal (who also takes credit for the rather comical-looking, blue-green skinned, white-haired and eyed Morlocks). Taylor narrates as we follow its wild history through a thrift shop to TV to movies like Gremlins.

Michael J. Fox also has some words about time travel as he sits in the machine and the documentary closes with Taylor and Young reprising their movie roles to add a new, very poignant scene that shows George still trying to change his friend’s destiny...as well as the world’s. It and the G-rated, splendidly-colored movie are both well worth watching!

This does remind one of The Planet of the Apes, although the Morlocks look and sound nothing like those clever apes. Luckily they hadn’t discovered fire yet and George used his matches! I was enthralled with the entire presentation and loved it even more the second time because campiness well-done doesn't happen everyday. It was escapist, magical fun that at the same time starts you pondering the ethics of changing fate, the future of our world and…

…which three books would you carry into a future that has no books? George had no problem with the ethics or choosing his three, but then I’m no scientist/inventor. I’ll be thinking about 1960’s The Time Machine for quite a while.






Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS