Welcome back from Spring Break! During that vacation we all hold so dear, I took a road-trip all the way down to Florida with several of my friends here at RPI. While there, we visited Disney World’s 24-movie theater complex and watched one of the latest films to grace the silver screen, The Time Machine.
Colorful and spellbinding in its special effects, the film seriously lacks from a storytelling standpoint.
The movie set begins in the early 20th century in New York City. Interestingly, this part of The Time Machine was filmed in your local town of Troy.
Why Troy, you ask? Well, Troy is fairly reminiscent of New York City during this historic Victorian period and retains many of the older looking buildings typical of the time. It was extremely intriguing to see different parts of Troy, such as Frear Park, show up in a major box office picture.
Outside of the local attraction, there really wasn’t much remaining in the film to redeem its terrible plot quality. The plot follows the harried adventure of Professor Alexander Hartdegen played by Guy Pearce. Pearce attempts to go back in time to prevent his recently-proposed-to fiancee from being killed.
Of course, the professor runs into your usual “paradox” situations where he can’t change things before he developed the time machine. So, frustrated with the past, the professor looks to the future to make an impact on society.
What initially was a colorful and somewhat historically accurate movie immediately turned sour at this point. Running into a series of foolish interactions with the future such as a falling human moon colony that destroys Earth, a new Ice age, and a full rebirth of life on this planet, the professor enters a new world 800,000 years into the future. This world, while remaining colorful, is so unbelievable and box-office driven that the viewer is no longer transported to another world. On the contrary, I was removed from the screen wondering what brought me to the theater in the first place.
If you are going to see this movie, I recommend you see it now on the big screen and not on video. If you see it in a theater on the big screen, you are more likely to get the full value out of the special effects. If you rent it on video, you might find yourself saying, “Man, I just wasted five bucks!”
