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75The film, in its early going, also has a nice light humor about it, and an engaging, albeit tragic, love story.
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75For the most part, it's imaginatively staged and consistently entertaining.
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70Delivers a thoughtful what-if for the heart as well as the mind.
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63A revisiting of George Pal's 1960 adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel. Pal's take on the book was visually delightful and occasionally clever; this one is always workmanlike and mainly pedestrian.
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60The Time Machine is, for the most part, a handsome, pleasant entertainment.
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60Machine makes its look-to-the-future-not-the-past message as clear as a Grammy acceptance speech, but as an exploration of regret and the elusive quality of time, it falls well short of "Memento," another film starring a sad-eyed Pearce.
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60Amazingly stilted before accelerating into its exciting finish.
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60As old-fashioned movie fun, this isn't bad, even -- especially? -- when it skirts the edge of silliness, and it's better than the 1960 George Pal version.
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50It's a movie that robs the story of its politics and point and never really matches the charm of the '60s film.
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50Most of Wells' details are there, and so is the basic premise, but the soul of the thing -- the point -- is missing.
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50There's something wrong with a time-travel movie that allows an audience's interest to drift so that we have time to worry over where he's parked, and whether he remembered to take his key.
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50Drab as it is, the movie is not impossible to endure -- in part because the concept has a timeless appeal.
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50The best thing about the new film of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine is the machine.
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50The Time Machine is stupid -- too stupid for the impressive special effects or the competently directed action sequences to wash away the bitter taste.
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50The last 40 minutes descend further and further into nonsense, until we're in an underground grotto where Jeremy Irons plays a furry, cannibalistic albino with psychic powers and super-strength.
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50Deliberately quaint and old-fashioned, a once-over-slightly exercise in nostalgic wonder directed by the British-born great-grandson of H.G. Wells, who treats the spirit of his ancestor's novel with literal-minded fealty.
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50In the new film, it's personal tragedy that provokes the journey, not social upheaval or even scientific curiosity -- which, predictably, makes for a story that's at once more familiar and less interesting.
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50If Welles was unhappy at the prospect of the human race splitting in two, he probably wouldn't be too crazy with his great-grandson's movie splitting up in pretty much the same way.
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50The film has no spirit of inquiry -- no spirit at all, really.
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50Weirdly disjointed and uncertain as to tone.
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40They STILL didn't get it right this TIME.
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40The film's two saving graces are the time machine itself -- a gorgeous, whirling array of burnished copper and blazing light -- and the CGI-created rise and fall of New York City.
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40This uninviting and pallid version, starring Guy Pearce, is intent on grinding all the sharp edges off the original story, in effect making the movie childproof, so no one can get hurt touching it.
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40Breaks down when it gets to the distant future, which in this case isn't a good place to be stranded.
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38A witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing.
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38Wells' vision of the distant future is cartoonishly simplistic without the subtext of British class consciousness that informed the novel.
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38So tedious it's almost worth watching to see just how bad acting, inadequate direction and most important, a criminally crass and unimaginative screenplay can make so little out of a proven idea.
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38The movie gives us a time machine that resembles a twin-engined Mixmaster and a script that was tossed together inside one.
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33While there are some glittery bits in it, the film is frustrating, cluttered, inelegant and garish.
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30Joyless and largely witless sci-fi fantasy.
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25If you want a movie time trip, the 1960 version is a far smoother ride.
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20If it's remembered at all, it will be as a time capsule of early-21st-century blockbuster cowardice and redundancy.
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10I’m getting fed up with classic films being remade or ruined by being turned into “Special Editions” that are less than special.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 15 out of 29
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Mixed: 7 out of 29
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Negative: 7 out of 29
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5
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PatC.2Took all the intrigue out of time travel.
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cbdd.4