YMMV / The Time Machine (2002)

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Did Alexander attack the Über-Morlock first to give the Eloi a chance to survive, or for using Emma's death as an example in their argument on what is considered natural law?
• Awesome Music: Pretty much the entirety of Klaus Badelt's score qualifies. "Eloi," "Stone Language," "Time Travel," "Morlocks Attack," "What If?", and "Godspeed" especially stand out.
• Misaimed Fandom: Of course the Morlocks are Always Chaotic Evil Manipulative Bastards and the Eloi are Idiot Heroes!
• Narm: "The Über-Morlock"? Really? It could have been worse. They could have called him "Peak Morlock."
• Narm Charm: Many stock scream effects are used throughout the film, though this is especially prevalent during the Morlocks' attack on the Eloi homestead. The Morlocks also have a stock bull sound as their main call. While certainly cheesy and a bit tension-deflating, it adds a fun B-movie charm to a very B-movieesque story.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Alexander jumping from 2030 to 2037 and finding himself in the middle of the Earth being ravaged by a moon terraforming attempt gone horribly wrong. When he tries to get back into his time machine and start it back up, he's conked on the head by a piece of debris and is left in there while the machine fast-forwards hundreds of thousands of years.
  • The inner areas of the Morlocks' lair are standard horror fare, considering that this is a race of subterranean cannibals. The alternate timeline that the Über-Morlock shows Alexander where he had a family with Emma is somehow worse than that, though, in a dissonant, uncanny way. You see it, the somewhat ethereal setting of his old laboratory now converted to a warm, loving home for his wife and children as his little son calls out to him, but you know that it's just wrong.
  • The Morlocks in general, unlike the nocturnal ghoulish like creatures in the books, they resemble burly Troglodytes with wide reddish animistic eyes and flatten noses that give them a Skull for a Head appearance.
  • The Über-Morlock, with his pale skin and icy blue eyes, looking much more humanoid than his legions yet subtly wrong. His death is pretty disturbing: He gets in a fistfight with Alexander while the time machine is running, and gets knocked out of the machine's sphere of effect, causing him to rapidly age (from Alexander's point of view), die, and decay horribly.
  • The Bad Future Alexander comes to after killing the Über-Morlock. It's an absolute hellfire landscape where the Morlocks have made complete slaves of the Eloi, and have kept this up for 635 million years!
• One-Scene Wonder: As with the Borg in Star Trek: First Contact, the Morlocks were given a leader that had not existed previously, in order to explain what was going on to those unfamiliar with the source material. Played with a side of cheese by Jeremy Irons.
• Strawman Has a Point: The Über-Morlock does rightfully point out that the predator/prey relationship the Morlocks have with the Eloi is a result of 800,000 years of evolving into that. As horrible as it is, Alexander is a man out of his time; even now, if a man from Alexander's time came here, they would consider us to have Blue-and-Orange Morality. He is trying to apply civilized human logic and moralities to a clearly tribal culture. Also noted is that Alexander only sees the Bad Future after he has killed the Über-Morlock, implying that if he didn't make his machine a temporal bomb, that is what awaited the Eloi without the controlling influence of the Über-Morlock.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Guy Pearce, at least according to Roger Ebert:
  Pearce, as the hero, makes the mistake of trying to give a good and realistic performance. Irons at least knows what kind of movie he's in, and hams it up accordingly.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • There is no denying that the actual time machine is beautiful, with its brass finishing and massive glass spinning wheels.
  • Also the time travel sequences themselves.

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