After scoring popular hits with When Worlds Collide and The War of the Worlds, special-effects pioneer George Pal returned to the visionary fiction of H.G. Wells to produce and direct this science-fiction classic from 1960. Wells's imaginative tale of time travel was published in 1895 and the movie is set in approximately the same period with Rod Taylor as a scientist whose magnificent time machine allows him to leap backward and forward in the annals of history. His adventures take him far into the future, where a meek and ineffectual race known as the Eloi have been forced to hide from the brutally monstrous Morlocks. As Taylor tests his daring invention, Oscar-winning special effects show us what the scientist sees: a cavalcade of sights and sounds as he races through time at varying speeds, from lava flows of ancient earth to the rise and fall of a towering future metropolis.

Time Capsule

This movie collects many of the ideas and fears of its own time, and straps them together with pieces of Wells's original story. There are some nice spots here, esp. Pal's signature stop animation in some of the time travel sequences, but not enough to save this from being only ordinary.

The 1950s-isms stand out quite clearly. The Eloi are Wells's gentle hedonists, playing ineffectually in a garden world. Here, they're all young, dressed in pastel tunics, coiffed, and blond - as if only blonds could be beautiful people. Complete lack of children in this world leaves me wondering where the next generation would come from, but issues of reproduction don't suit this movie's era. Wells's troglodytic Morlocks become monster-movie standards: green, clumsy, with glowing eyes. And, to satisfy the moral needs of the time, characters identified as good defeat the ones identified as evil, without much though to where the good guys' next meal might come from.

This movie was made in the 1950s, so the threat of nuclear war has to figure somewhere in the story. Missile silos come to mind when we see the air shafts into the Morlock's underground city. The big presence, though, is the air raid sirens, co-opted as triggers for a bizarre but recognizable instinct.

This is a fair bit of nostalgic entertainment. It loses all the social imact of Wells's story, and adds features that don't really add much. Despite that, it's still a fair popcorn movie.

//wiredweird

Great story line and clasic rendition

This video is a classic of its era. Good special effects that accompany a pretty good story.

Please Make a Time Machine Faithful to the Book

As a book to movie purist, why can't either movie address the main contention in the source? The Eloi created the Morlocks! The Eloi were the wealthy class, and the Morlocks were the workers. Any socialist philosophy aside (and I am far from a socialist), it makes the book highly engaging, because those who you would normally root for (the Eloi), and the villains (the Morlocks), it turns out the monsters are the victims. Great stuff (which is why it's a great book). Why must Hollywood, both in 1960 and 2005 (or whenever that other tripe was made) simplify and elimininate this crucial point! Well, you want something much worse, check out On the Beach, the great book, and then the god-awful 2000 and whatever version! WRETCHED!!!