The plot: The Hood (Kingsley) is a villain who (recite in unison) seeks world domination. His plan is to rob the Bank of London. The Thunderbirds are distracted when a Hood scheme endangers their permanently orbiting space station (did I mention Dad was a billionaire?), and when Dad and the older kids rocket off to save it, the coast is clear—unless plucky young Alan, Fermat, and Tin-Tin can pilot another rocket vehicle to London in time to foil them. In this they are helped by Lady Penelope (Sophia Myles) and her chauffeur (Ron Cook).
As the Tracys rocket off to rescue the space station, I was reminded of the Bob and Ray radio serial where an astronaut, stranded in orbit, is reassured that “our scientists are working to get you down with a giant magnet.” Meanwhile, his mother makes sandwiches, which are rocketed up to orbit. (“Nuts!” he says. “She forgot the mayonnaise!”)
Among the big Thunderbirds f/x scenes are one where the kids use their rocket ship to rescue a monorail train that has fallen into the Thames. This and everything else the Thunderbirds do seems to be covered on TV, but try to control yourself from wondering where the TV cameras can possibly be, and how they got there.
Paxton was in Spy Kids 2 and at least knows this territory. Let it be said that he and Kingsley protect themselves, Paxton by playing a true-blue 1960s hero who doesn’t know his lines are funny, and Sir Ben by trying his best to play no one at all while willing himself invisible. A movie like this is harmless, I suppose, except for the celluloid that was killed in the process of its manufacture, but as an entertainment it will send the kids tip-toeing through the multiplex to sneak into Spider-Man 2.
The Time Machine
(DIRECTED BY SIMON WELLS; STARRING GUY PEARCE, JEREMY IRONS; 2002)
The Time Machine is a witless recycling of the H. G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing. It makes use of computer-aided graphics to create a future race of grubby underground beasties who, like the characters in Battleship Earth, have evolved beyond the need for bathing and fingernail clippers. Because this race, the Morlocks, is allegedly a Darwinian offshoot of humans, and because they are remarkably unattractive, they call into question the theory that over a long period of time a race grows more attractive through natural selection. They are obviously the result of eight hundred thousand years of ugly brides.
The film stars Guy Pearce as Alexander Hartdegen, a brilliant mathematician who hopes to use Einstein’s earliest theories to build a machine to travel through time. He is in love with the beautiful Emma (Sienna Guillory), but on the very night when he proposes marriage a tragedy happens, and he vows to travel back in time in his new machine and change the course of history.
The machine, which lacks so much as a seat belt, consists of whirling spheres encompassing a Victorian club chair. Convenient brass gauges spin to record the current date. Speed and direction are controlled by a joystick. The time machine has an uncanny ability to move in perfect synchronization with the Earth, so that it always lands in the same geographical spot, despite the fact that in the future large chunks of the moon (or all of it, according to the future race of Eloi) have fallen to the Earth, which should have had some effect on the orbit. Since it would be inconvenient if a time machine materialized miles in the air or deep underground, this is just as well.
We will not discuss paradoxes of time travel here, since such discussion makes any time travel movie impossible. Let us discuss instead an unintended journey which Hartdegen makes to eight thousand centuries in the future, when Homo sapiens have split in two, into the Eloi and Morlocks. The Morlocks evolved underground in the dark ages after the moon’s fall, and attack on the surface by popping up through dusty sinkholes. They hunt the Eloi for food. The Eloi are an attractive race of brown-skinned people whose civilization seems modeled on paintings by Rousseau; their life is an idyll of leafy bowers, waterfalls, and elegant forest structures, but they are such fatalists about the Morlocks that instead of fighting them off they all but salt and pepper themselves.
Alexander meets a beautiful Eloi woman (Samantha Mumba) and her sturdy young brother, befriends them, and eventually journeys to the underworld to try to rescue her. This brings him into contact with the Uber Morlock, a chalk-faced Jeremy Irons, who did not learn his lesson after playing an evil Mage named Profion in Dungeons & Dragons.
In broad outline, this future world matches the one depicted in George Pal’s 1960 film The Time Machine, although its blond, blue-eyed race of Eloi have been transformed into dusky sun people. One nevertheless tends to question romances between people who were born eight hundred thousand years apart and have few conversations on subjects other than not being eaten. Convenient that when humankind was splitting into two different races, both its branches continued to speak English.
The Morlocks and much of their world have been created by undistinguished animation. The Morlock hunters are supposed to be able to leap great distances with fearsome speed, but the animation turns them into cartoonish characters whose movements defy even the laws of gravity governing bodies in motion. Their movements are not remotely plausible, and it’s disconcerting to see that while the Eloi are utterly unable to evade them, Hartdegen, a professor who has scarcely left his laboratory for four years, is able to duck out of the way, bean them with big tree branches, etc.
Guy 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. Pearce seems thoughtful, introspective, quiet, morose. Surely the inventor of a time machine should have a few screws loose, and the glint in his eye should not be from tears. By the end of the movie, as he stands beside the beautiful Eloi woman and takes her hand, we are thinking not of their future together, but about how he got from the Morlock caverns to the top of that mountain ridge in time to watch an explosion that takes only a few seconds. A Morlock could cover that distance, but not a mathematician, unless he has discovered wormholes as well.
Tomcats
(DIRECTED BY GREGORY POIRIER; STARRING JERRY O’CONNELL, SHANNON ELIZABETH; 2001)
The men in Tomcats are surrounded by beautiful women, but they hate and fear them. That alone is enough to sink the film, since no reasonable person in the audience can understand why these guys are so weirdly twisted. But then the film humiliates the women, and we wince when it wants us to laugh. Here is a comedy positioned outside the normal range of human response.
The movie belongs to an old and tired movie tradition, in which guys are terrified that wedding bells may be breaking up that old gang of theirs (only last week we had The Brothers, an African-American version of the theme, but gentler and nicer). There is always one guy who is already (unhappily) married, one who is threatened with marriage, one who claims he will never marry, and then the hero, who wants to marry off the unmarriageable one to win a bet. This plot is engraved on a plaque in the men’s room of the Old Writer’s Retirement Home.