Movies - Time Machine

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	Movies - Time Machine

The Time Machine is a 2002 movie filmed by Simon Wells as a remake of The Time Machine
(1960), starring Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons, Orlando Jones, Samantha Mumba, & with a cameo by Alan Young from the earlier film. Both movies are based on the 1895 novel The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells.

Plot

Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) is a scientist who lives in late-19th Century New York City. Obsessed with the idea of time travel and convinced that it is theoretically possible, he lectures at a local school and often gets into trouble for his free-thinking, radical theories. In 1899, after proposing to his fiance Emma, a mugger attempts to take her ring and she is killed in the struggle. For the next four years, Hartdegen spends every waking hour in his laboratory working on his time travel calcualtions. Eventually, he succeeds in building a working Time Machine. Finally ready, he goes back in time to prevent Emma's murder, being careful to avoid meeting himself. Saving her from the mugger, he escorts her home only to have her run over by a steam powered car. He goes back again and saves her from the car, only to have her die from some other cause. After fifty attempts, Hartdegen realizes that every time he goes back in time to prevent her death, she will die in a different way.

He eventually decides to go forward in time to find out if there are any answers to the problem in the future. He stops in the year 2030 and learns that the Moon is being prepared for lunar colonisation. He talks with Vox, the New York library's holographic, artificially intelligence librarian. Vox has information on the novel The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells, but does not have any information on time travel theory, stating that it is impossible. Finding nothing of use, Alex moves on another seven years where he finds the moon mining operation has disrupted the lunar orbit. As a result, the moon is breaking apart and showering the earth with massive chunks of rock. After a brief struggle with security, he makes it into the time machine. Hartdegen is knocked out, and fails to witness the catastrophic destruction of human civilisation. He and the machine speed through hundreds of millennia, with the landscape ever changing & evolving.

Regaining consciousness, Alex brings the machine to a halt in 802,701 AD. He finds that civilization has degraded to the point where humans have degraded to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Calling themselves the Eloi, these survivors have built their homes into the side of a cliff above an ocean inlet. Hartdegen begins to develop a relationship with a woman named Mara, one of few who recall some of the Time Traveller's obsolete language.

While the humans are out foraging for food, they are attacked by pale, hairless creatures that Mara calls Morlocks. It is discovered that the Morlocks regard Eloi as meat animals, and hunt them for food. The creatures capture Mara and carry her off.

Trying to find out where she has been taken, Alex is told that the Ghost might know. As it turns out, they are speaking about Vox (Orlando Jones), the holographic librarian that Hartdegen had talked to before the destruction of the moon. With Vox's help, Hartdegen finds a way into the underground realm of the Morlocks. He discovers that they have a caste-like society, with each caste (nearly a different species in itself) fulfilling a different role in Morlock society. The ruling caste of this society are the super intelligent telepaths. While Hartdegen is rescuing Mara, he is trapped by the Morlocks who take him to their leader.

Alexs machine has been found by the Morlocks and taken underground. Attempting to explain his actions, the leader of the Morlock race (Jeremy Irons) reasons that he and his people are not evil, they are simply the result of millenia of evolution. He then reveals the reason that Hartdegen cannot alter Emmas fate; he is caught in a Temporal Paradox. Since Emma's death was the prime factor that drove him to build the time machine, he cannot use the machine without her death being incorporated into the timeline. The Leader also states that the Morlock race would not exist without Hartdegen, but he doesn't explain why. Alex learns that the Morlocks were people who chose to stay underground after the Moon collapse and the Eloi were those who chose to brave the fallout.

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Movies - Time Machine

Plot

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