Time Machine (2002) — A Gordian Knot of Freshman Philosophy

In Part 3 of my extended review, I look at the film’s effort to tease apart the philosophy of fighting vs, accepting one’s fate

Photo by Den K on Unsplash

Last time, we saw that the traveler had awakened in a mysterious village, the home of this movie’s version of the Eloi.

One Eloi, Mara, can speak English and is kind enough to nurse him back to health. She also helps him find out more about her people — plus, she knows where the time machine is. She’s willing to take him to the machine the following morning. It looks like the traveler is going to narrowly avoid disaster and will be able to return to his own time the next day.

I won’t go over the issues with the scenes that lead up to this moment in detail again. But I do want to reiterate that the amount of luck the traveler experienced in just getting to this point in the story cannot be overstated. It’s lucky that, when he was knocked out, he woke up just long enough to turn the machine off when he did. It’s lucky that his machine didn’t fall off a cliff then, because it turns out that outside forces can affect the time bubble around the machine. It’s also lucky that Mara found him before a Morlock did. I could go on, but to come to the point: one primary hallmark of bad storytelling is that the entire plot is driven by one unlikely circumstance after another.

The audience should forget where it is

Good and bad writing are on a spectrum. Underlying this spectrum is the suspension of disbelief. That is, viewers should forget where they are while they’re being entertained.

A few unlikely events are annoying but forgettable. The audience might raise an eyebrow or two, but viewers’ brains won’t suddenly switch from entertainment mode to analysis mode. They will continue to suspend disbelief for a while. However, if one event after another is driven by chance and contrivance, then the audience is taken out of the story. They’ll start wondering about the logistics or implications behind what’s going on.

It’s perfectly fine for the audience to ponder the implications, logistics, and meaning of a story after it’s over. But the writer shouldn’t want them thinking about such things as the story progresses. The goal is immersion first, then reflection. During the telling of the story, the audience should be wondering about the characters’ motivations, whether the hero will live, and so on. Thus, plot holes, contrivances, and things that generally don’t make sense will pull the audience away from the story, switching them into analytical mode and reminding them that they are in a theater or a rec room.

The film blew past this spectrum — this suspension of disbelief — the moment the moon crumbled. By the time our traveler is nestling into his bed after waking up, the movie is little better than a series of Polaroids connected by a long macaroni necklace — the Polaroids are the scenes the writers cared about; the macaroni is the long series of contrivances and plot holes that link these scenes together.

The baffling dream

During the night, the traveler has a dream where he sees the sphinx-like construction that was present in the original book and the 1960s film. He wakes up to Mara’s younger brother, Kalen, screaming. He has had a bad dream as well. When the traveler asks Mara about this, he learns that he has had the exact same dream as the young child. This dream is one of the most baffling aspects of the story. To understand why, I need to explain the events of the following day.

After they wake up, Mara eventually takes the traveler back to his machine. Along the way, there is some superficial talk about letting go of the past by remembering it vs. living in the present vs. fighting for the future. All of this is meant to serve as both a character arc for the traveler, who is having trouble letting go of his deceased fiancé Emma, and as a justification for why the Eloi won’t flee from the Morlocks — whom the audience has yet to see. But this back-and-forth between Mara and the traveler doesn’t work for either purpose because it is just as nonsensical as the dream.

The puzzle of the Eloi’s motivations

Mara emphasizes the importance of remembering the past in two ways. One: she shows the traveler the remaining signs from New York City. The Eloi’s tradition of studying the signs to learn the English language is meant to communicate the idea that remembering the past is important. But this doesn’t work narratively speaking because nearly all of the Eloi forget the language as soon as they learn it. Two: the second way they remember the past is by building windmills that are basically memorials devoted to their fallen loved ones.

These loved ones are the people taken by the Morlocks, but the audience isn’t meant to realize this yet. However, these windmills don’t work as a plot device either because, while the Eloi build them to honor their fallen, they refuse to talk about their deceased loved ones as a rule. The purpose of a memorial is to remember, but the Eloi do not wish to remember. Therefore, there’s no point to these windmills. So the only thing they memorialize is a giant plot hole, a complete inconsistency in the script. There’s no way a people determined not to say their fallen loved ones’ names would memorialize them. The Eloi are simultaneously honoring and ignoring their past.

The puzzle of the traveler’s motivations

As for the traveler, he wishes to fight for the future. I believe the idea the writers were trying to communicate was that the Eloi and the traveler can learn from each other. But the traveler ends up winning his fight with the Morlocks, which shows that he is right to fight. And if his struggle with the Morlocks succeeds, then, given the setup the writers have created, the traveler should come away from this encounter more determined to save Emma than ever. The Eloi don’t teach him anything at all.

How it got to be so complex

This Gordian knot of freshman philosophy is created because the writers have written themselves into a corner by changing the motivations of the traveler and the nature of the Eloi. They need the traveler to be wrong for trying to save Emma and to accept his fate. At the same time, they need the Eloi to fight the Morlocks and survive. But they also need them to be passive in the beginning in order to justify the traveler’s determination to save their race.

But the lessons that the Eloi and the traveler must learn are incongruent. Either the Eloi are right to accept their fate, or the traveler is right for desiring to fight. Both cannot be true, but the writers need both to be true to make their narrative work. So, what the audience sees is a confused sprinkling of philosophy scattered throughout the film that is almost impossible to follow.

The closest the writers come to solving this problem is that, at one point, the traveler tells Kalen that sometimes a person must accept his fate, and other times that person must fight. But there is nothing in the story to suggest that the traveler has learned to accept Emma’s fate. So why should he conclude that the Eloi must fight while he must give up?

We’ll look at the next scene and why the dream was such a baffling choice next time.