Time Junk

HOW TO BUILD A TIME MACHINE

There are a million microbudget documentaries out there, for reasons I can't come close to understanding, but I still can't help but imagine that How to Build a Time Machine is one of the better ones.

2016 (weird film festivals for nonfiction films)/2017 (Hulu)

Written and directed by Jay Cheel

Spoiler alert: mild

Cardboard Science: If God's a-comin', He ought to make it by then

THE TIME MACHINE

George Pal comes back to Hollywood, to the science fiction genre, and to H.G. Wells, all at once, with his second directorial feature.  Happily, Pal's The Time Machine is a true classic of the genre, at turns almost hypnotic in its proto-psychedelic visuals—and, in that grand Wellsian tradition, possessed of an unsubtle but well-taken point about the era its creators happened to live in, too.

1960

Directed by George Pal

Written by David Duncan (based on the novella by H.G. Wells)

With Rod Taylor (H. George Wells, the Time Traveller), Alan Young (David Filby and James Filby), and Yvette Mimeux (Weena)

Spoiler alert: the Morlocks are eating them

Steven Spielberg, part XXIX: Vast and cool and unsympathetic

WAR OF THE WORLDS

Spielberg tries his hand at the end of the world, and by dint of making his adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel in 2005, manages to go very far in capturing all the spectacle and the horror of it.  Yet although this War of the Worlds succeeds, on average, as a film that might well be retitled Scenes From the Martian Apocalypse, it also mishandles almost as much as it gets right.  Its undeniable triumphs thus stand next to its great and glaring ineptitudes.

2005

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Josh Friedman and David Koepp (based on the novel by H.G. Wells)

With Tom Cruise (Ray Ferrier), Dakota Fanning (Rachel Ferrier), Justin Chatwin (Robbie Ferrier), Miranda Otto (Mary Ann), Tim Robbins (Harlan Oglivy), and Morgan Freeman (The Narrator)

Spoiler alert: once again, they die of germs; but as for the original content, severe

Cardboard Science: "What are these Martians?" "What are we?" I answered, clearing my throat

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

One of the great science fiction novels becomes one of the most important science fiction movies—and so much is lost in the translation that what you actually wind up with is a very influential, yet (ironically) mostly sterile, genre experience.  So it goes.

1953

Directed by Byron Haskin

Written by Barre Lyndon (based on the novel by H.G. Wells)

With Gene Barry (Dr. Clayon Forrester), Ann Robinson (Sylvia van Buren), Lewis Martin (Pastor Collins), Les Tremayne (Gen. Mann), Charles Gemora (The Martian), and Sir Cedric Hardwicke (The Narrator)

Spoiler alert: they die from germs