Wells (played by Rod Taylor, a rather hunky and quite capable Australian, who recently starred in The Twilight Zone). ![]() It opens with a dinner party at the house of inventor, H.G. In broad strokes, the film follows the book, but there are some key differences, in part to be topical to the era in which it was made. ![]() It is a beautiful, timeless piece of film that, I imagine, will provide entertainment decades from now–perhaps even in the far future depicted in the movie.īut I get ahead of myself. Note that I say fantasy: time travel stories often get categorized as science fiction, but this movie is a pure flight of fancy, and a delightful one at that. Now, I’m not usually given to hyperbole (in fact, I can safely say I’d sooner die than engage in such a hackneyed endeavor), so you can believe me when I report that The Time Machine is easily the best fantasy film of the year. George Pal’s The Time Machine knocked my socks off. Journey to the Center of the Earth was one of the better films of 1959, but it bore little resemblance to the source material. In general, book adaptations are loose, at best. Occasionally we see good B-listers, usually we see bad ones. Sometimes we see good A-listers, sometimes we see bad ones. At least once a month, my daughter and I will trek out to the local drive-in or parlor and take in a science fiction film. So they had hair on their heads, but the color of hair and eyes weren't mentioned.Have I got your attention? My faithful readers know that I am an avid movie-goer. They had noticeably small ears and bright red, thin lips with little, pointed chins. He does refer to their Dresden-china prettiness and then mentions their hair as being uniformly curly and coming to a sharp end at the neck and cheek, with no indication of facial hair. When he takes more notice of a group of them he makes no mention of any being taller or shorter. He said the first one he saw was perhaps four feet tall. The time traveler's initial impression was that they were very beautiful, graceful and indescribably frail creatures. Actually the Eloi were not hairless in the novel. ![]() It was be a large stretch of the imagination that he'd fall in love with a "short, pale, hairless, and almost genderless" woman. The Eloi are most likely changed from the book so that it could be more plausible that Rod Taylor would fall in love with a pretty blonde-haired girl. None of these presumptions were confirmed or denied by George Pál (1908-1980). Others have suggested Pál chose that look because of the prevailing stereotype that blonds are not very intelligent. The Eloi are however clearly shown as being short. Some viewers have suggested that director George Pál chose to make the Eloi tall, thin, and blond because of the prevailing concept in the mid-20th century of the Aryans as being the superior human. In the book, the Eloi are short, pale, hairless, and almost genderless. Like an impatient fool, I lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over, and I was flung headlong through the air." I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerve. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk-one of the risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. ![]() So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered I was, so to speak, attenuated-was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction-possibly a far-reaching explosion-would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions-into the Unknown. He wrote: "The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied.
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