THE TIME MACHINE
- PRODUCTION: USA 2002
- DIRECTORS: Simon Wells, Gore Verbinski
- STARRING: Guy Pierce (Alexander Hartdegen), Samantha Mumba (Mara), Sienna Guillory (Emma), Kalen (Omero Mumba), Jeremy Irons (Ueber-Morlock), Orlando Jones (Vox).
SYNOPSIS
In 1899, Dr Alexander Hartdegen is a young inventor teaching at Columbia University in New York City. After a mugger kills his fiancée Emma, he starts building a time machine to travel back in time and save her. Four years later, he travels back to 1899 and prevents her murder, only to see her killed again in a different way. So, Alexander travels forward in time to 2030 to discover if science has been able to solve the question of how to change the past. At the New York Public Library, a holographic librarian called Vox 114 insists that time travel is impossible, so Alexander travels to 2037, when the accidental destruction of the Moon by lunar colonists has begun rendering the Earth virtually uninhabitable. While restarting the time machine to avoid falling debris, Alexander is knocked unconscious and accidentally travels 800 millennia into the future. When he regains consciousness and stops the machine, it is the year 802,701. The human race has reverted to a primitive lifestyle, and the Earth has healed. Some survivors, called Eloi, live on the sides of cliffs of what was once Manhattan. Alexander is nursed back to health by a girl named Mara, one of the few Eloi who speak English. One night, Alexander and Mara’s young brother, Kalen, dream of a frightening face. Alexander informs Mara of the dream and she tells him they all have that dream, and he notices that his watch is now missing. The next day, the Eloi are attacked, and Mara is dragged underground by ape-like monsters. The creatures are called Morlocks and they hunt the Eloi for food. In order to rescue her, Kalen leads Alexander to Vox 114, which is still functioning after 800,000 years. After learning from Vox how to find the Morlocks, Alexander enters their underground caves and he is almost immediately captured and thrown into the area where Mara sits in a cage. There he meets an intelligent, humanoid Morlock, who explains that Morlocks are the evolutionary descendants of the humans who went underground after the Moon broke apart, while the Eloi evolved from those who remained on the surface. The humanoid Morlocks are a caste of telepaths who rule the other Morlocks. Alexander asks the Morlock leader to give him back his watch and the Morlock says that the watch also represents memory for him, too. Alexander gets into the machine but also pulls the Morlock in with him, carrying him into the future as they fight. The Morlock dies by rapidly ageing when Alexander pushes him outside the machine’s temporal bubble. Alexander then stops over six hundred million years in the future in the year 635,427,810, revealing a harsh, rust-coloured sky over a wasteland of Morlock caves. Finally accepting that he cannot save Emma, Alexander travels back to rescue Mara. After freeing her, he starts the time machine and jams its gears, creating a violent distortion in time which kills the Morlocks. Alexander begins a new life with Mara and the Eloi in 802,701.
Adapted from: https://timemachine.fandom.com/wiki/
BEFORE WATCHING
12. Read the synopsis and answer the questions.
1. Who is Alexander Hartdegen?
2. Why does he decide to build a time machine?
3. Who are the Eloi and the Morlocks? Where do they live?
4. How does Alexander kill the Morlocks?
GLOSSARY
debris: detriti
gear: cambio
to heal: guarire
to jam: pigliare
mugger: scippatore
to revert: ritornare
rust: ruggine
wasteland: terra desolata