The Time Machine

The Time Machine is a novel by H. G. Wells, first published in 1895, later made into two films of the same name. This novel is generally credited with the introduction of the concept of time travel using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively.

Film versions

George Pál (who also made a famous 1953 "modernized" version of Wells' The War of the Worlds) filmed The Time Machine in 1960. This is more of an adventure tale than the book was; also the division of mankind results from mutations induced by a nuclear war during the twentieth century, and the Eloi speak English. The film was remade in 2002, starring Guy Pearce and Jeremy Irons and directed by Wells' great-grandson Simon Wells, with an even more revised plot. It garnered dismal reviews and was not very successful. In both movies the Eloi were given language abilities and a love affair between a female Eloi and the Time Traveller is part of the plot.

Related Topics:
George Pál - The War of the Worlds - 1960 - Nuclear war - English - 2002 - Guy Pearce - Jeremy Irons - Simon Wells

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The earlier film is noted for its then-novel use of time lapse photographic effects to show the world around the Time Traveller changing at breakneck speed as he travels through time.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The film's story (1960 version)

It is New Year's Eve in London. A small group of Victorian men dressed formally are talking in a room. In the center of the room there is a table with a wooden box on it. They are talking about dimensions. One of the men says that he can understand three dimensions: e.g. the length, width, and height of the box, but cannot understand a fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is theoretical, and people do not perceive it as existing. The protagonist (George) says that that is because we are not free to move backwards and forwards at will in the fourth dimension, but are confined to a point on it: the present.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Then George opens the box and inside it is a small-scale replica of the time machine. He explains how it has a lever which when pushed forward will cause travel of the machine into the future, and if pulled backward will cause travel of the machine into the past. Spatially though, the machine stays in the same position on the table. Then George demonstrates by pushing forward the small lever, causing the machine to blur, then disappear.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Later the meeting is over. The clock ticks 12am: it is the new year of 1900. George tells happy new year to the lady housekeeper. George opens the door to a room in his house which faces a garden, and in the room there is a full-scale version of the time machine. The machine is like an open sleigh with one seat, a large disk behind the seat which is capable of revolving, and controls in front of the seat. The controls have the lever which can be pushed forwards or backwards, three small elliptical displays: one green, one yellow, and red. The yellow and green are smaller and above the red display: they are for month and the day. The red display is for the year. He sits on it, pushes the level forward slightly. He notices that the candle is melting faster and that the clock on the wall is going faster than his watch (which is unaffected). Then he pushes the lever more and the hands of the clock revolve visibly around the clock. He sees the sun and the clouds running across the sky, again and again, through the skylight windows of that room which is like a greenhouse (because so much of the walls and the ceiling are made out of glass, so that he can see the outdoors). He sees the shifting shadows and patches of sunlight moving across the non-glass walls of the room.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

At a certain forward (futureward) speed he sees what happens to the window display of a store for women's dresses across the street. The display has a lady mannequin which is seen by George to quickly be dressed and undressed by the store-keeper. He slows down and stops the machine on occasion to see how the mannequin has been dressed, wondering how her dress will change in the future. So he starts the machine again, pushing the lever forwards, and sees people scurrying quickly through the street and the mannequin being dressed and undressed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Then there are flashes in the sky. Eventually the room becomes boarded up and he can no longer see outside. He stops the machine and steps out of it. It is 1917. His room, and other rooms in the house, are full of cobwebs. Some cobwebs block the doorway, so he cuts through them with his hand. He steps out of the house, which has been fenced up around with wooden boards. He pushes some boards out of the way, also unboards the glass windows of the room he is in. He walks over to the store and meets a man in uniform who he thinks is his old friend David Filby. But George finds out that the man is not David but rather his son James. The father has died in the Great War, but James remembers that his father mentioned a friend of his called George, because the abandoned house across the street had never been liquidated by David but instead kept in memory of his friend, who David believed would one day return. James invites George in for tea, but George refuses, instead going back into the house, to the machine.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

More travelling forward in time. When George stops the machine again, in 1940, there are barrage balloons in the sky and sounds of bombings: "It must be the new war". Then a bomb falls on top of his house and burns it to the ground, but leaves him and the machine intact, since they are not stationary in the present of the surrounding environment but travelling though it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He stops again in 1966. He steps out of the machine onto the grass, and sees several people walking towards him, then past him, into some doorway. Across the street Filby's store has turned into a more modern building taking up a large portion of the block. There is an elevated train. James Filby is now older, with grey hair, and wearing something similar to a space suit, which protects against radiation. James comments that he vaguely remembers having met George somewhere, sometime earlier. Then alarm sirens are heard, and George cannot keep James from walking towards the doorway: "we must go into the shelter." Then something appears in the sky, and James says: "There is the atomic satellite." James goes into the shelter, and George is left alone. Then there is an explosion, the sky turns red. The explosion releases lava from the Earth's underground, so hot lava is moving down the street and George gets back into the machine and starts going forward in time. Soon the lava covers the machine up, then it dries up. George is nervous, wringing his face with his hands and praying that if he goes far enough into the future that the lava cover above him will disappear.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Past the year 800,000 the roof of dried-up lava starts crackling and falling, then clears off. He sees new plants and trees growing on the ground. Then a building rises up. He stops the machine in the year 802,701 and steps onto the grass. In front of the time machine is a grotesque building with a big statue of a head on top of it. The face is narrow and triangular: in a way it resembles the statues on Easter Island.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Then George visits the natural surroundings. There are a lot of trees, some with fruit. He calls it a paradise, but then he wishes he had someone to share that paradise with. He finds a domed building with a staircase leading up to it. Parts of the domed roof of the building have broken, and small pockets of grass grow on the stone steps leading towards the entrance of the building. He goes inside the building and sees several low round tables. Around the tables are no chairs but pillows, on the ground, for sitting. The tables are set with white plates, wine (?) glasses, and a big bowl full of fruit in the middle of each table.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Then he sees some people in the distance. They are young (adult) people, dressed in simple, plain clothing of solid pastel colors. They are sitting near a river. In the river a young woman is drowning. None of the others seem to notice her. Then George gets into the river and rescues her.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Later she walks up to him and asks him "Why did you?" (save her life). He asks her for her name and she answers "Weena". He asks for the name of her people and she answers "Eloi". But she does not know how to write, so George writes these names down on the ground in printed capital letters using his finger to clear away dust. He dots the end of the word, then Weena dots the beginning of it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The young people walk up the steps of the domed building. Inside the building they sit around the tables and eat the fruit. George sits at one table and tries to engage others in conversation. He mentions how some of the big fruit they are eating would be considered unusually large by the civilization he came from. The young people seated around him are not very conversant. He asks them if they have a government, or any laws. A young man responds "We have no laws." George asks them if they have books. The young man responds "Books? We have books." He leads George into another room. There are some books on bookshelves. George picks up a book, but the book is very old and it crumples up easily in his hand. Then he sweeps his hand through a row of books and the books crumble to dust. Back in the large dining room, George gets angry and chides the young people for being so ignorant, indifferent, oblivious.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In his fit, he walks out of the domed building and goes towards the time machine, but the time machine has disappeared. The tracks of its sleighs have been left on the ground, indicating that the machine had been dragged into the building with the big head-statue on top of it, behind a pair of big, smooth, plain metallic doors. George tries to open the metal doors, unsuccessfully: he bangs at the doors with a rock, but the rock breaks up into pieces.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Weena tells George that the Morlocks are inside that building; that they would have dragged the machine into it. At night, Morlocks move furtively behind the bushes, and George lights up matches trying to discern them, but the Morlocks prefer to stay hidden.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Weena shows George a place behind the building where there are big circular holes on the ground: uncovered man-holes, except that they are wider and have low walls around them, like wells. Looking into them George can see that they are like air-shafts leading into a subterranean place. There are columns of metallic handle-bars built into the walls of these air-shafts, which a person can use to climb up or down. Also, through these holes a mysterious periodic hammering noise is heard to issue from the subterranean place.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

George starts climbing down one of these shafts, but then a siren alarm is heard and he starts climbing back up. The alarms issue from several cones which have sprouted around the big head-statue above the building. Each cone has a column of about three holes through which the sound is emitted. Weena has started walking at a slow steady pace towards the front of the building, and she joins other Eloi who are walking at the same slow, steady, somnambular pace towards the front of the building. George runs after her, looks for her. At one point he grabs one girl but when he gets her to turn around it turns out she is not Weena, so he lets her go. He complains that they move dumbly like cattle. He does not reach Weena in time: she and several other Eloi have gone into the building through the metal doors which were open while the siren alarms where sounding but which closed soon after Weena got in. Many Eloi were left outside, in front of the door.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Then George goes around to the back of the building, to where the holes on the ground are. He climbs down the air-shaft of one hole, reaching the subterranean place, which is like a big artificial cave. In one chamber he sees human cadavers, the result of cannibalism: the Morlocks eat humans. In other chambers there are big machines which look like big electric transformers: with metallic coils spun around pairs of vertical tubes which support (and are joined to) a horizontal tube at their top. What these machines do is not specified by the movie.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Morlocks use whips to corral the Eloi into a certain chamber. The Morlocks are now seen to be hideous hominid, ape-like creatures. They have big chests, bluish skin, big dark drooping eye-chambers, but instead of having eye-balls they have light-emitting (or reflecting?) points of light in the middle of their dark eye-chambers. Thus, they can see in the dark, but they are afraid of light. George turn on some matches, attempting to frighten the Morlocks which use whips and who are corralling the Eloi. Eventually he discovers that if he punches a Morlock with his fist, the Morlock will recoil: Morlocks do not move too fast. Fighting ensues. At one point a Morlock has George dominated with his whip, then one of the male Eloi summons up enough courage to punch that Morlock with his fist, which saves George for the moment. Weena pitches in: George tells her to grab the torch which he had previously lighted up. With the torch they scare off a lot of the Morlocks who are accosting them. Then they use it to light up flammable material in the cave, such as some hanging "curtains" at the entrance of one of the chambers where the Morlocks were trying to herd the Eloi. This starts a fire and it definitely scares off the Morlocks. Then the Eloi manage to get out of the cave, back to the surface, through the air-shafts. Back on the open ground, the Eloi, under George's guidance, hurl tree branches into the holes, which feed the fire inside. The Eloi move away from the area behind the building where all the holes are. The holes explode, and they see this entire area (with the holes) cave in, fall down flat, crushing the subterranean place.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In front of the building, the metal doors are now open, and the Eloi tell George that they see his machine in there. George goes in, but the metal doors close in behind him. A Morlock appears, and George travels to the future on his machine, to see the Morlock die and turn to dust, leaving his ape-like cranium and his bones behind. Then George travels to the past, back to 1900, to January 5th. He tells his story to his friends, the same group of men as at the beginning of the story, but only Filby believes him. George takes a flower out of his pocket and shows it to them: it is a flower which Weena gave him after he rescued her. He gives the flower to Filby who knows about botany, to see if Filby can identify it, but he can not. When the other men are leaving, outside, Filby tells them that, if anything, it is a rarity to find such a flower blooming in winter. Then he goes back in the house.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

By the time he reaches inside the room where the time machine was, it is too late: George has left again. This time there are marks on the ground of where the time machine was dragged back from where it had been dragged by the Morlocks (the machine was dragged in back inside from the snowy garden outside). Filby tells the lady housekeeper what the tracks on the ground mean. Then he comments that someone like George would not go back to another time without first having come up with a plan. Looking at the library he sees that there are three books missing. Filby asks the lady housekeeper what three books she would choose to take with her if she were to restart a civilization. Then he remarks that "he has all the time in the world."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~