The Time Machine Rating: Release Date: 03 October, 2000 Retail Price: $19.98 OUR Price: $13.99 You SAVE: $5.99! Cast: Rod Taylor Sebastian Cabot James Taylor Yvette Mimieux Complete Cast (5 total)

The Time Machine Reviews

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Stunning Film Treatment Of The Famous H. G Wells Sci Fi Story
The 1960 film version of "The Time Machine", was always one of my absolute favourites growing up and rewatching it now as an adult I appreciate now even more the great effort put in by the legendary George Pal and his talented cast and technical crew in bringing this story vividly to life. Their attention to detail, and creation of what are still awe inspiring special effects were of course created using their collective imaginations without the help of today's computers. I'm not going into exclamations as others have about the effects appearing "dated", by today's standards as that is a pointless exercise and really why is there a need to compare efforts such as this made in 1960 with the technology available to movie makers today? I look at the film in the context of the time it was made in and in this way it can be seen that "The Time Machine", was very state of the art entertainment upon its release. Using the excellent literary source in the famous novel by H.G. Wells, MGM studios in a last gasp of its famous move making finesse fashioned an exciting, thought provoking, and above all else spectacular story here that looks as fresh today as it did over 45 years ago. What is so totally impressive about this film version still for me is the marvellous depiction of the passage of time once the story gets under way and this progression by Rod Taylor on his time machine from New Years Eve 1899 through many thousands of years into Earth's future is still one of the greatest science fiction sequences ever filmed in any decade. George Pal's brilliance in visual design is wonderfully evident in every frame of these scenes where he shows the passing of time by the continual speeded up rising and setting of the sun and moon and best of all by a wonderful idea of continually showing the clothes on a mannequin standing in a neighboring shop window continually changing as the fashions progress over many decades. The time machine itself is a wonderful piece of movie making design and in the decades since the film's release has really taken on a whole life of its own as probably one of the most famous movie props ever created. For all sci fi film lovers like myself this wonderful piece of imaginative construction along with the whole classic movie to which it belongs has assumed an appropriately timeless quality and illustrates yet again the genius that was movie maker George Pal.

An Interesting Adaptation
"H. G. Wells' The Time Machine" is another of the great George Pal movies which did so much to bring science fiction to the big screen. Naturally, the movie is based on H. G. Well's book "The Time Machine", which was first published in 1895. However, there is a significant change between the movie and the book. In the book, Wells focused on a class struggle which ultimately resulted in the separation between the Eloi and the Morlocks. The movie, though, is about war. The main character George (a.k.a. H. G. Wells) stops at three places in time, each of them being a major conflict; World War I, World War II, and the last a nuclear war which George Pal places in the year 1966, just six years after the movie.

The movie debuted in Japan on June 10th of 1960, before moving on to the U.S. on August 17th of the same year. The movie stars Rod Taylor as George, with Alan Young playing David Filby and James Filby (father and son), Yvette Mimieux as Weena, and Sebastian Cabot as Dr. Hillyer. This movie, along with "Destination Moon", "When Worlds Collide", and "War of the Worlds" are classics produced by George Pal, which defined science fiction in the movies. After "The Time Machine", Pal turned his talents to fantasy, producing films like "Atlantis, the Lost Continent", "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm", and the wonderful and bizarre "7 Faces of Dr. Lao".


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