The Time Machine
“The cinematic process has often been compared to a ‘time machine' in its ability, its necessity, to expand, compress and re-arrange time. Of the few features which directly address the theoretically dubious concept of traveling back and forth in time, Marker's La Jetee and Resnais' Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime treat it in a meaningful way. Only Pal's interpretation of H.G. Wells' classic ‘The Time Machine' survives respectably of those films that explored the more directly physical methods.

“Maintaining the Victorian period of Wells' story, the machine itself is an oddly convincing mating of a giant sundial and a sleigh from the Czar's winter palace. The pacing and continuity underlying Rod Taylor's first tentative trials, then on through the Blitz and a 1966 where London is destroyed by atomic warfare...support the incredulous action. The stop-motion effects as he shimmers through centuries while cities rise and fall like sandcastles...is an unforgettable sequence of the screen.

“Arriving in the distant future of 802,701 A.D. Taylor discovers the Eden-esque, surfer-blond Eloi, lotus-eaters in the ruins of a once-great culture. Beneath the city lie the warrens of the subterranean, devolved Morlocks. William Tuttle's grotesque masks and shaggy manes give them the air of a bad night at the Tiki Room, and their kidnapping and cannibalism of the Eloi will make you wary of sewers and basement apartments. Though the conflict sometimes lapses into simplistic ‘Beatniks vs. the Flower Children' level, Pal achieves a deep, elemental dread and déja-vu/aprés-vu unique to this film.”