The Future isn't what it used to be

I've a confession to make - I'm in this movie as an extra. I'm one of the out of focus musicians on the bandstand in the Central Park scene. (I spent a week of nights freezing my butt off in a park in Schenectady while they filmed it.) That out of the way, I'd like to make some comments.
This movie was not as well received as the 60's version. (It's been years since I saw that one, so I can't really compare.) There are several reasons. One is the problem with turning the story into a movie.
The original HG Wells epic isn't really a story of any great character depth. The Time Traveler goes into the future, discovers things haven't really worked out for the human race and after some narrow escapes, comes back to tell a few friends about it before disappearing back into time. Plenty of big ideas and a long vista, but not much of a story in personal terms. Basically, it's just a travelogue.
The 1960 version took the basic ideas, and turned it into more of an adventure film rather than just a Big Idea story, fleshing out the Time Traveller and making him much more of a person the audience could get emotionally involved with. It was well done and enjoyable to watch - but also had the advantage of presenting a lot of novel ideas and imagery on screen for what was the first time for many people.
Fast forward to 2002. Time travel is old hat to audiences; they've grown up seeing it in all kinds of variations, from tragedy to comedy. Ditto for dystrophic post-apocalypse futures. This latest version attempted to refresh the story by giving the hero (And yes, it's also a hero story) much more of a background and motivation to travel in time. Further, it added a complication HG Wells never addressed - the trouble with the paradoxes of time travel.
It was a more ambitious storyline, and ultmately, harder to bring off. The bar was higher, the goals were greater, and the end result didn't quite succeed as well as the first movie in putting together a sufficiently satisfactory conclusion.
The other thing that happened is the future changed drastically between filming the movie and releasing it. There was supposed to be a scene showing New York City being destroyed by huge chunks of falling space debris, including the Twin Towers. Before they could release the movie, 9-11 happened, and there was no way they could let it go into the theaters after that. Months of delay and some re-working followed, and they never quite gave it the promotion it needed.
All that being said, if you've never seen the George Pal version, and just watch it for the story you see on the screen, it's not the worst way to spend a little time. The scenes in 1899 are fantastic; NYC a bit over a hundred years later ain't too shabby (the first scene with Orlando Jones is a hoot), and the special effects are quite enjoyable.
Some day, I'm hoping they will release a version restoring the footage that had to be cut; I'm still wondering how they had to change the movie to work around that, and what it might have done to the overall result. Just for fun, if you can find someone who has never seen either film version nor read the book, I'd like to know how they'd react to the 2 films if they saw the Simon Wells version first, and the George Pal version second.

this is an awsome show

dude the beging of this show is funny. no matter how hard he tries he ends up killing his wife

you must be joking

Pity they didn't go into past and taken this movie with them