THE TIME MACHINE: The Journey Back is a documentary on one edition of the DVD, chronicling the construction and design of the elegant time machine from George Pal’s film. The documentary includes a scene in which Herbert George (Rod Taylor) returns from the future to try and save one of his friends from his foredoomed death in WWI. Charming, and worthy of a footnote in my book.
SyFy’s MORLOCKS (2011) preserves the idea of Morlocks as a cannibalistic, dark-dwelling offshoot of humanity, but otherwise throws Wells under the bus. Stargate’s David Hewlett is the wormhole expert who discovers Robert Picardo is ruthlessly exploiting the tech with the ultimate goal of having “Project E.L.O.I.” use Morlock DNA to cure his son’s cancer. This has one shocking moment (when they learn Earth-Morlock is only 68 years ahead, not centuries), otherwise the usual depth and power of a SyFy movie, including an anti-climactic ending (to close a wormhole, all you need is a big bomb!). “I thought with one shot, I could solve all my problems.”
THE CHRONOLOGY PROTECTION CASE (2013) probably shouldn’t make the cut as it’s a short film (I’m not covering those), but as it’s based on a novella by a Serious SF Author (Paul Levinson) and has gone from student film to commercial release, I figured I’d at least check it out. Unfortunately the film is dreadful (I’ve seen much better student work) with tons of exposition (the leads is supposed to be a physics buff but apparently he doesn’t know anything that’s been discovered since the Theory of Relativity) and the concept—a string of random accidents are the universe’s way of killing off time-travel researchers so they can’t alter history—amounts to Final Destination turned SF by adding lots of technobabble. “It’s like the apple from the tree of knowledge—I can lead them away from the tree but I can’t get them out of the wood.”
PREDESTINATION (2015) adapts Heinlein’s “All You Zombie’s for the story of a time-traveling protagonist who discovers she’s actually her own father and mother. Unfortunately while this worked at short-story length, John/Jane’s life plays out pretty dull on-screen, whether it’s her growing up an orphan or her recruitment into NASA as a space courtesan (to keep astronauts relaxed on long voyages—the sexism really ages this), and the sex change really seems irrational. While this does add a second plot involving timecop Ethan Hawke that fits the spirit of the story well, a little less fidelity might have made for better viewing. “He’s laying out the dominos—you know we’re just watching them fall.”
Moving to less serious SF we have CASHBACK (2006), which was even less of a candidate for my book than I thought. While the Netflix tagline said it’s about a supermarket cashier who discovers he can stop time, that’s actually just a fantasy of his to while away the dull graveyard shift. Instead this is a third-rate story of a guy trying to get back on that bicycle after being dumped by his girlfriend, with a mopey hero and tedious reflections on his uninteresting sexual history. “From that time on, his mother thought we were gay.”
WE’RE BACK: A Dinosaur’s Story (1993) is a Disneyesque Filmed Book in which a kindly scientist (voiced by Walter Cronkite) gives a quartet of dinosaurs super-intelligence and takes them to the 20th century, where they’re befriended by children and then captured by the scinetist’s evil twin. Saccharine, but I’m surprised nobody ever sequeled this. “A giant clam shell that opens to reveal an American flag held by a mermaid!”
