The Time Machine (1960) Directed by George Pal. Screenplay by David Duncan based on the 1895 novella The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Starring Rod Taylor, Alan Young, and Yvette Mimieux.
It’s a snowy night in London, just a few days after the dawn of the 20th century. A group of men gather at the home of their mutual friend, an inventor by the name of George, who has invited them over for dinner but is currently absent. The men drink their friend’s booze and grumble about his lack of punctuality. It’s only after they’ve been ushered into the dining room and seated at the table that their host finally makes an appearance.
George (Rod Taylor) stumbles into the room, dirty and bedraggled, and asks for a drink before explaining where he’s been. That explanation goes something like this: Remember how you were all over here a few days ago? Remember how you all made fun of me? Well, guess what, suckers! I invented a time machine.
I’m paraphrasing, but only a little. This is the framing device that introduces The Time Machine (1960), which is based on the H.G. Wells novella of the same name. The protagonist of the book is only ever called the Time Traveler; in the movie he is winkingly named H. George Wells. George Pal, the film’s director, was a dedicated H.G. Wells fan. He had already adapted The War of the Worlds (1953) and would later acquire the rights to (but never produce) Wells’ 1899 novel The Sleeper Awakes. He also produced Destination Moon (1950), which was among the first films to aim for a practical, realistic portrayal of space travel. (Yes, it’s on the Film Club list.)
And this isn’t really relevant to The Time Machine, but it’s fun to know anyway: Pal had begun his career as an animator. Specifically, he got his start using replacement animation, the type of stop-motion animation where, instead of changing the model frame by frame, a series of hand-carved wooden puppets are filmed frame by frame to give the appearance of motion. He started out with dancing cigarettes in an advertisement and went on to make an entire series of animated ads and films; all of these films are collectively called the Puppetoons series. You can take a look at some examples: a Philips radio ad from 1938, a clip from a version of Dr. Seuss’s “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberrry Street,” and in The Puppetoon Movie (1987), which Pal’s friend Arnold Leibovit produced to showcase Pal’s work.
Let’s leave the puppets and go back to London in 1905. Around that dinner table, and in the film’s voiceover, George recounts where he has been. He reminds his friends that just a few days ago, on New Year’s Eve, he invited them over to witness a demonstration of a miniature version of his time machine. The miniature version of the time machine looks exactly like the large version, right down to having a plush red armchair for the driver to sit in. (Does this mean the armchair is a necessary component of the time travel mechanism? This is the first of many questions that go unanswered in this film.)
At that previous get-together, the small machine vanished right in front of them, but George’s buddies were skeptical that it actually traveled through time. I don’t blame them for that; I too would require rather more proof. What I do blame them for is encouraging George to put his considerable imagination and intellect toward something more commercially profitable, like helping with the Boer War. I’m just saying, if a friend tells you he has invented a time machine, maybe don’t go immediately to, “How about colonial war profiteering instead?”
As the friends leave, Filby (Alan Young) advises a thoroughly demoralized George not to do anything rash.
So George goes back inside and immediately does something rash, because that’s what intentional time travel is all about!
I’m using “intentional” to distinguish the kind of story typified by The Time Machine from other kinds of time travel stories. Time travel is broad, flexible, multifaceted concept that has (probably) been around for as long as humans have been telling stories. There are myths from cultures around the world about people who find themselves in situations where they are taken out of their own time and returned years or centuries later. Sometimes they travel to another land where time passes differently; more often they simply fall asleep. Such journeys usually happen thanks to the meddling of gods or demons or supernatural creatures, or purely by chance, as opposed to being something the time travelers choose for themselves.
Intentional time travel in fiction comes along a bit later—it’s been around for a few centuries, but trying to pinpoint any precise origin is a lesson in historical futility—and more specifically the shift from utilizing magic to constructing purpose-built machines had to wait for the Industrial Revolution to come along. H.G. Wells wasn’t the first to write about a machine invented to travel through time, but he was among the earliest, and he was definitely the one who popularized the idea of purposeful, exploratory time travel as a specific science fictional trope.
George is upset that his friends don’t support his dreams and aspirations, so he hops into his full-size time machine to test it out. He starts small, and his delight grows as he sees the world pass more and more quickly around him. He watches the candle burn down, the seasons change, the fashions on a storefront mannequin evolve.
This sequence is the best part of a film that is, on the whole, a rather mixed bag. The time machine itself is a lovely, ornate prop; it was designed by Bill Ferrari and built by Wah Chang. You have 100% without a doubt seen Chang’s work before. Working on Star Trek: The Original Series, he was the man responsible for the tribbles, the Gorn costume, the Vulcan harp, as well as the communicator that Motorola engineer Martin Cooper cited as inspiration for the world’s first handheld mobile phone.
Gene Warren and Tim Baar won the Academy Award for their special effects, but I also want to call attention to the cleverness of Paul Vogel’s cinematography. The simulated time-lapse flow of George’s trip through time is accomplished by means of a mechanical lighting effect: circular shutters with segments of different colors to simulate the changing sky. Unfortunately, there are also examples where the rushed production and low budget really do show: spots where you can see how the matte paintings don’t line up with the foreground; some odd discrepancies in the depth field of certain scenes; the regrettable choice to use chunky oatmeal as lava. (In all fairness, they had 29 days to film and less than $1 million to work with.)
George makes a stop in 1917, where he’s both excited about being able to visit the future and meet Filby’s grown son (also played by Alan Young). But he’s also dismayed to learn that the future means war and the death of his friend Filby. His next stop, right in the middle of the Blitz in 1940, does little to convince him that humanity is on the right track.
So he travels ahead a bit more to 1966, where he finds that the unknown-to-him but known-to-the-audience Cold War fears of nuclear Armageddon are coming true, as an “atomic satellite” detonates and triggers—please imagine me tearfully trembling and clinging to my PhD in geophysics as I type this—a volcanic eruption that engulfs London.
It’s curious that at no point does George consider going back. He escapes by going forward again: forward as he and his time machine are encased in lava, forward as he waits for the stone to erode away. In the year 802,701, he finally stops again. This time he finds a pleasantly lush landscape with nice weather, abundant fruit trees, and a cheerful population of people who appear to live a life of complete leisure.
George thinks it’s very swell that humanity has reached the point of being able to laze about on idyllic rivers instead of laboring and warring—until he sees a young woman drowning in the river, and he realizes with horror that nobody is trying to help or even seems to care. He only grows more appalled as the young woman, Weena (17-year-old Yvette Mimieux, in her first role), tells him more about her people, the Eloi, and their ignorant, uncurious way of life. George, a proper Englishman in his dedication to the Great Man theory of history, fully believes that the Eloi just need somebody to show them how to be better, and they will be. All the while we are trying not to think too much about the movie’s choice to develop a romance between George and the childlike Weena.
George does grow a bit more sympathetic toward the Eloi when he learns that they are always in danger from the Morlock, who are furry, subterranean, and have stolen his time machine. He learns that the Eloi and Morlock both evolved from humans in the past, thanks to a centuries-long war that drove part of the population underground. And, yes, we all have a great many questions about this scenario, but we shan’t be asking them here, because they have no answers within the film.
Everything that happens after that point is a bit silly: Weena and several other Eloi are taken by the Morlock, George goes to save them, there’s a fight that involves a lot of whips and fur suits catching on fire. George rescues the Eloi and does great damage to the Morlock caverns, and there is some drama over whether he’ll be able to leave before he finally gets his time machine back and has to return to the past to escape the Morlocks.
This ending is one place where the otherwise quite faithful movie diverges from the book. In the book, the Time Traveler keeps traveling into the future, in some passages that are eerily beautiful in how Wells describes Earth’s strange and frightening far future, when the Sun is dying and life on Earth has changed beyond recognition. In the movie, he heads right back to the year 1900 and the dinner party, where he recounts his tale to his highly skeptical friends; he then leaves again, presumably (back) to the same future. The book’s Time Traveler also disappears into his travels, with a promise to the narrator that he’ll be back with proof in half an hour, and is never seen again. The narrator speculates that he could have gone anywhere in the past or future; there is no suggestion that he’s returning to the Eloi’s world for any purpose.
All in all, the first part of the movie feels charmingly old-fashioned, with its Victorian protagonist marveling at the wonders and horrors of the 20th century as he travels through the future. But the second half feels not old-fashioned but outdated, and I’ve been thinking about some reasons why that is.
What I keep coming back to is that there is literary and political context to H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel that I think does not translate well into a Cold War-era film—even though, at the same time, I think that thematic misalignment is interesting.
There was another very popular time travel story published toward the end of the 19th century, this one of the “fell asleep and time passed” variety, and that was Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward. Bellamy’s book is an example of utopian fiction: a book that exists to imagine a more perfect world from a philosophical, political, or sociological point of view. (The professor of my college “Utopian Fiction” philosophy class would be so proud that I’m finally using what she taught us.) These days we’re used to interpreting portrayals of a perfect world as dystopian, but Looking Backward was fully in earnest in its description of a socialist future. So too was William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890), because socialist utopian thought experiments in the form of fiction were quite popular around that time.
Wells’ The Time Machine is a bit of an oddball, in that it was born of the same socialist literary tradition as Looking Backward and News From Nowhere, but it’s also an early example of the now-common sci fi premise of an apparently utopian world that is in fact deeply fucked up. He wasn’t the first to write about an apparent utopia disguising an actual dystopia, but he was influential in a larger shift that was taking place across literature—the shift away from those thought experiments about better worlds and toward thought experiments about worlds that have gone very wrong in attempting to be perfect.
By the time George Pal made The Time Machine in 1960, the world was already familiar with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (the English translation was published in 1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and well as with films such as Metropolis (1927) and Things To Come (1936, written by H.G. Wells himself).
That is—with the caveat that this is a generalization and there are always counterexamples—by 1960, fiction about failed or dystopian societies tended to be based on the very real political problems writers were seeing in the world around them. And that is captured in the first part of The Time Machine, when we see the prediction of Cold War paranoia in the volcano-inducing destruction of War World III. But the film never achieves any depth when it comes to exploring the society of the Eloi and Morlocks, which is noticeable only because George says several times that he wants to learn more about the societies of the future.
I don’t always like to spend so much time comparing a film adaptation to its source material, but I think The Time Machine is an interesting case because it’s so easy to see the ways in which science fiction—in both books and film—changed after, around, and in response to H.G. Wells’ novel. The result of adapting the tale in the midst of that ongoing cultural evolution is imperfect, with a promising beginning but sort of falling apart toward the end. It exists as a sort of patchwork example of the different ways we imagine what the future might look like, if we ever get a chance to visit.
What do you think about The Time Machine and its place in the history of time travel fiction? I didn’t mention the 2002 remake. I actually saw it when it came out, but I realized as I was reading through the Wikipedia article that I remember absolutely nothing about it, not even that Jeremy Irons was in it as the Morlock leader. So I can’t offer much comparison—anybody who remembers more, or wants to mention other adaptions and interpretations, is invited to chime in!
Next week: Another take on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine with Singeetam Srinivasa Rao’s Aditya 369. This time we’re starting in Hyderabad, India in the ’90s and heading to both the past and the future. Watch it on Amazon.
“a volcanic eruption that engulfs London.”
Hmmm. I wonder if John Christopher’s “Sword of the Spirits” series is in that universe, what with its volcanoes going off in England.
Poor England! They live on a chunk of relatively chill sedimentary rock, only for sci fi writers to inflict all manner of tectonic horrors upon them.
I always thought the idea was that the nukes had cracked the crust and let the mantle burst free, not that they’d triggered a dormant volcano. Movies often have a way of overestimating how much damage human weapons can do to a planetary body. Heck, look at the 2002 remake of The Time Machine where the Moon is fractured due to nuclear detonations meant to create underground cities. As I said in my blog review, the Moon has survived many, many far worse explosions from asteroid impacts, which is where all those craters came from.
This is a classic, for its style, its visuals, its music, and much of its cast. (Yvette Mimeux was quite lovely but quite untalented.) It has its flaws, certainly, but it’s a lot of fun. I do like how it updates Wells’s story in retrospect to make it a commentary on the increasingly destructive wars that came in the 20th century and where that was likely to lead. Wells wrote the Morlocks and Eloi as a commentary on class warfare, I think, but Pal made it more of the end result of actual warfare, with the air raid siren surviving through the ages as the harbinger of the next Morlock attack. The message may be a bit muddled, but the use of that sound is potent, and would’ve been even more so for 1960 audiences who still remembered the Blitz. (And wouldn’t you know it, at the exact moment I finished that sentence, the monthly test of my city’s severe weather sirens — repurposed from what were originally air raid sirens — began outside. An eerie coincidence.)
One thing that’s always bugged me about the book’s and the film’s depiction of time travel is that the Time Machine wasn’t so much time travelling as putting its occupant in a stasis field so he saw the world move around faster outside him, while the machine stayed in one place. (Which avoids the usual question of how a time machine ends up in the same place it started on the Earth’s surface even though the Earth is constantly moving through space.) But then, why couldn’t people outside see the time machine and its nearly frozen occupant within? I guess these days we’d handwave it as being “out of phase” or something.
On my free blog, I reviewed both the 1978 TV-movie remake, which was incredibly awful, and the 2002 feature remake directed by H.G. Wells’s grandson, which was flawed but much better than I expected:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2020/01/06/another-really-bad-70s-sftv-movie-the-time-machine-1978/
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2020/02/19/another-take-on-the-time-machine-the-2002-remake-spoilers/
Agree about the use of 1960s memories of air raids in the film–both the 1966 time nuclear attack and the Morlock raid echo that quite effectively!
Yes, I’m sure I read that Wells extrapolated based on real events where workers were being given underground dwellings in somewhere like Essex (or if not that were being housed in some way that was inhuman) but I’m having trouble confirming that at the moment and I read it over 20 years during my English BA. So it was, given his Fabian Society leanings, very much focussed on class warfare.
I’ve seen it suggested that it came from Uppark, a stately home where his mother was housekeeper. The rich lived in luxury upstairs, the servants in the basement.
Ah yes, that’s it. I didn’t remember that it was such a close connection, which as Christopher points out makes it odd that he doesn’t redeem the Morlocks in any way. But maybe that was calculated for his expected audience of the day.
Kind of paradoxical, though, since it shows the descendants of the working class as the cannibalistic bad guys. Sure, he doesn’t exactly paint the Eloi in a flattering light either, but they’re the ones the Time Traveller sides with.
Yes, definitely, I almost put that in my comment that it doesn’t seem to fit with his sympathies at all. The best I can do is see it as a warning that if things continue in a certain direction it will lead to this, where all you upper classes will be eaten!
Of course, when you’re a kid the absolute best part of this movie is the dead Morlock’s stop-motion rapid decomposition scene.
The only thing about the remake I remember is the Time Traveler trying to save his fiance’s life by going back in time to prevent her murder, then giving up after one try when she dies from some other cause. “Oh, well…I guess the universe wants her dead.”
Let’s me honest, the stop-motion decomposition scene is still great, even for adults. :)
Yeah, I called that out in my review. He gives up after just one try and he calls himself a scientist? Science demands repeatability. Also, how does he get from “history changed so she died in a completely different way” to “history cannot be changed, period”? Although the movie did eventually give a credible answer for why he couldn’t change the one specific thing he was trying to change.
On balance George Pal did a fair job of adapting the Time Machine. The 1960 movie may be flawed but it has a charm that is far superior to the 2002 remake. As noted here it is very much a product of its time both in terms of naivete and skewed perspectives. Smushing together the Edwardian and the 60’s makes it an ironic time capsule.
This movie defines Rod Taylor for me. And young me has fond memories of Yvette Mimeux when the movie popped up on BBC one rainy Sunday afternoon. It is probably fair to say that The Time Machine opened the door for popular time travel movies. However it doesn’t define time travel movies for me. The genre is a popular one as it encompasses so many possibilities for storytelling, on a grand socio-geological scale (The Time Machine) or on a small personal scale (Time Crimes).
For my money the best H G Wells time travel movie is Time After Time – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_After_Time_(1979_film) – for pure entertainment – and my favourite time travel movie of all is probably The Terminator, for writing, execution and profundity. Both build on the Wells legacy but in very different ways.
Flawed but charming really does sum it up.
I have Timecrimes and Time After Time on the list to watch in the future (and obviously Terminator, which I love)–figuring out how to group time travel movies was a challenge in itself, but there are so many fun ones to choose from. We’ll definitely revisit the theme!
An interesting one I hadn’t come across until recently was Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea.
Besides the titular time machine, I remember the kid me being wowed by the talking rings. Wildly impractical — but they looked so cool! And with Paul Frees’ voice no less.
Regarding Wells writing in a socialist literary tradition, I seem to remember reading that he intended his dystopian future as an “if this goes on–” cautionary tale of what may eventually happen with the continued domination of the effete “upper classes” (the Eloi) over the “lower orders” (the Morlocks).
Right! I’ve read The Time Machine but not much of his other work, but he also wrote other works exploring dystopian and utopian ideas specifically to explore that class stratification.
Like you alluded to in the article, the film has a sort of hokey charm to it. It’s not perfect, and the Morlocks look a bit too much like overgrown Smurfs for my taste, but I still enjoyed it. The sci-fi films of this era definitely seem to have a certain characteristic to them. (i.e. The Time Machine’s tone reminded me a lot of Forbidden Planet).
Yes, there is a sort of… well-meaning earnestness in the tone, but it’s not entirely lacking in self-awareness or humor, so it does come across as charming.
Now that you’ve said the Morlocks look like Smurfs, I won’t be able to unsee it.
“But he’s also dismayed to learn that the future means war and the death of his friend Filby.”
There’s a short sequel on the DVD I have where the Time Traveler returns but fails to talk Filby out of the actions that lead to his death. He reminds himself that he has all the time in the world to try again … I like it.
I love the film. it has the best looking time machine on screen ever.
One thing I love about the novel is that Wells is clearly mocking other writers with the Time Traveler’s comments that when fictional people wake out of suspended animation 500 years in the future (or whatever) there’s always someone who can info-dump them on the world. No such luck. He admits even his theory of the class warfare origins of the future is guesswork and could turn out to be complete nonsense.
Oh, interesting about the sequel! Will have to take a look at that.
The time machine really is a beautiful object, isn’t it? It’s such an interesting design–ornate and elegant, and set up so that the time traveler is literally in an armchair watching time glide by.
It’s online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qWRd-zkBDI
Thanks for the link. I read about that scene in Starlog back in the day and always wanted to see it.
I have a soft spot for this movie. It’s one of my earliest, vague memories of television in the mid sixties. I’d later catch bits and pieces of it over my childhood and adolescence on various local TV stations back when most of them had their own film collections with afternoon movie shows all called something like “Million Dollar Movie.” I never caught the movie in its entirety until college when there were so many film guilds you could catch an old, independent or foreign film on the big screen almost any night of the week.
I have to admit I was pretty underwhelmed. The actual time travel bit is sort of quaint if somewhat creaky. The bit with the mannequin is cute but the glimpses of the world wars through the roof is sadly half-baked. The brief layover at the onset of the atomic war is just embarrassing, shot on a tiny corner of the backlot with extras running around in old “Forbidden Planet” costumes and helmets spray painted silver. Don’t even get me started on the out-of-focus “lava” miniature. This has to be one of the cheapest looking MGM movies ever produced.
The whole post apocalypse story has potential and there are flashes of nice production design sprinkled throughout with a lot of embarrassing set dressing (more “Forbidden Planet” props). The story goes nowhere, devoid of suspense or inspiration with Taylor carrying the whole movie on his shoulder until it all collapses in on itself like the Morlock’s underground dwellings at the climax. The last act has kind of a nice moment but only because of the chemistry between Taylor and Alan Young (who gives a lovely performance here) and the whole thing leaves one underwhelmed and wanting so much more.
I think the problems all boil down to Pal who, not unlike Irwin Allen, could deliver great eye candy when he worked with a decent budget for a big studio with access to all of their resources. Here, unable to afford a snappy director like Byron Haskin and a competent writer like Barre Lyndon and lacking the inventiveness of a Val Lewton in getting every penny on the screen everything falls flat. Pal is a terrible director, maybe even worse than Allen and there were still some great, inventive directors around at the time like Jacques Tournier or John Brahm who were working for peanuts so I can’t imagine why he didn’t just hire one of them.
More than anything the film marks the sad decline of Pal’s career and everything after it is even more dismal (see his Atlantis movie). I remember when he tried to rally a second act after “Star Wars” came out and while it seemed sad nobody could spare him some loose change I think it was for the best. The thought of him bringing Phillip Wylie’s “The Disappearance” to the screen was tantalizing but I can’t imagine the results being anything but dour especially if he had directed it.
In the end, it’s a nostalgic guilty pleasure but little more. The time machine itself is very cool and maybe the best piece of steampunk rendered onscreen. Mimieux is lovely and Taylor, a better actor than he is often given credit for, tries his damndest but alas.
Random closing thoughts:
Producer Buck Houghton specifically decided to shoot “The Twilight Zone” at MGM to have access to the studio’s backlot right around the same time. The giant stairs Taylor ascends to the domed ruins show up in a number of episodes, most notably in the Burgess Meredith heartbreaker, ‘Time Enough at Last.’
Pal tried to resurrect “The War of the Worlds” as a television series at Paramount in the mid seventies with “Star Trek” designer Matt Jeffries onboard. He got as far as a demo reel featuring the revolutionary Magicam system that computer-synced one camera shooting actors against a blue screen with another camera fitted with a small snorkel lens on a miniature set. The idea was intriguing (see the Library of Alexandria sequence in “Cosmos”) but they could never work the bugs out while Pal’s premise for the series was so dumb (Earth builds starships and retaliates against Mars) no network would touch it with a ten-foot pole.
The Wells novel is worth reading even if it is lacking in the story department. There’s a powerfully fatalistic scene near the end where the time traveler goes to the far future when the sun is in its final death throes and humanity is extinct with only a giant, primitive crab like creature the only apparent sign of life.
I’ve always been intrigued by the Magicam system — or rather, the Imagevision system, as it was actually called, since Magicam was the name of Douglas Trumbull’s FX company that created the technology. I’m puzzled that it never caught on. It’s always claimed that they couldn’t get the bugs out, but it worked spectacularly well in Cosmos, and in Mork and Mindy‘s “Mork in Wonderland” episode where it was used to composite the “shrinking” Robin Williams into live-action sets. It’s strange that it was deemed impractical when it worked so well in those instances. It basically did with miniatures what Lucasfilm’s “Volume” today does with digital sets.
The process was also used to create William Katt’s superhero flying sequences in The Greatest American Hero, though it was less effective there since it was usually just compositing him against stock aerial footage. There was also an attempt to use it to create FX for The Starlost, and there’s a demo reel you can find on YouTube that shows some sample shots. I hadn’t known about the War of the Worlds reel when I talked about Magicam in my Patreon review of GTAH. The pilot review is free:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/100972196
Magicam was a fascinating process, but I think it suffered from the fact that the elements for subject and background had to be photographed in real time, which gave away the scale of miniature environments in any shot that involved camera movement.
Most FX techniques back then had “giveaways” of their artificiality — jerky stop motion, matte paintings that were clearly static paintings, visible matte lines, etc. — and integrating live actors with miniature sets or stop-motion creatures had been done using split-screen techniques or bluescreen for generations. Yet audiences still accepted the illusion. So I don’t buy that it would’ve been a dealbreaker for Imagevision/Magicam. The Cosmos scenes of Carl Sagan in the miniature Library of Alexandria were fantastically good by 1980 standards, better-looking than much of the FX you saw on TV shows later in the ’80s. And “Mork in Wonderland” showed that the real-time compositing could work well for integrating live-action images as well as miniatures. (The Greatest American Hero also used it that way, but not as well.)
I suspect that the reason the Magicam process was abandoned was less to do with the technology and more to do with Trumbull walking away from Hollywood after his troubles with Brainstorm‘s production and its box-office failure. If he had the patent on it, maybe that precluded others from creating their own versions. Plus, not long after posting my above comment, I remembered there was a similarly-named technology developed at the same time called Introvision, which used a front-projection system for in-camera compositing of actors with background plates; it was used extensively in Outland and in later films like Stand By Me and The Fugitive. Maybe Imagevision was outcompeted by Introvision, although it seems to me that Imagevision has the advantage of shooting both components simultaneously in real time, while Introvision required creating the background element first.
I think Cosmos mostly used Introvision, which was a somewhat simpler process. And of course suspension of disbelief is a variable thing, but those Starlost tests definitely feel like tabletop models when any part of the environment is in motion. The Mork shots don’t have that problem since the actor:set scale relationship is reversed.
No, Cosmos used Magicam’s Imagevision, at least for the “Cosmic Calendar” and Library of Alexandria sequences where Sagan was composited into miniature sets. I remember reading about it back in the day — it was when I first heard of Magicam. And of course I read up on Magicam more recently as research for my Greatest American Hero rewatch reviews.
And I still don’t see how the setting looking like a miniature is any worse than the setting looking like a matte painting. After all, lots of FX techniques have always looked fake; even today, CGI often looks fake. The makers of TV shows and movies have to consider practicality as well as artistic quality. The advantage of Magicam’s process, in principle, was that it allowed creating composite shots in real time, making it faster and more efficient than conventional optical mattes that had to be created after the fact. I’d think people would’ve been willing to take the tradeoff of ease of use over realism. After all, that’s what happened when the Video Toaster made fast, economical CGI feasible on a TV budget — starting with Babylon 5, many shows in the ’90s-’00s embraced CGI that looked a lot less convincing than conventional FX, because it let them create far more versatile shots and do it economically. So I can’t believe that “It looks like a miniature” would’ve been a dealbreaker for Magicam, not if the process had proven technically feasible. That’s why I’m so surprised that it didn’t catch on more widely, since the examples we had looked pretty great by the standards of the day.
I last watched The Time Machine on a double bill with War of the Worlds, and it struck me that beneath their colorful mayhem, both films are sad meditations on the waste and inevitability of war.
I just watched this and I am so sad that he didn’t go to the end of the world future. That was always my favorite part of the book – ‘eerily beautiful’ is exactly right, and I was wondering how they were going to portray the giant crabs, among other things.
I also spent the last 20-ish minutes of the movie wondering how the Morlocks could be the machinery-using, technological folks and also be afraid of / not know what fire is. But alas, I was undoubtably not supposed to think about that…
The Morlocks are nocturnal and can’t handle bright lights. Thus, they would not like open flames.
_Looking Backwards_ is by Edward Bellamy, not John.
Updated, thanks!