The Time Machine (1960)

This post is part of my ongoing project to watch my science fiction blindspots. You can find my list of upcoming movies for this project here.

There’s a disappointing mix of imagination and lack thereof here, and the pieces that showed imagination and ingenuity were overshadowed by the pieces that felt like so many other stories I’ve seen before.

I found the special effects charming: the miniature cars floating on lava, the Morlocks’ glowing eyes, the handful of matte paintings, the stop-motion work. The budding flowers and the skeleton decomposing and the mannequin display that changed with the seasons and the fashion all worked for me, because the movie focused on them all as objects of wonder as well as ways to mark the passage of time. Each time the time machine landed, however, the movie lost me. George (Rod Taylor) left me wanting a more compelling main character. Taylor knows how to pose and move—his entrance into the story, bedraggled and bursting through a doorway, was striking—but I never believed him as a character. Like the time machine, he exists only to move the plot along, a vehicle for the audience to travel in.

Even George appears compelling when contrasted with the future humans he finds in the year 802,701. Here the movie shows everything I dislike about mid-century science fiction: the representation of generic humankind by a handsome, blank white man; alien cultures that appear idyllic and childlike, and who must be taught to fight and think for themselves by the empty man-shape who encounters them; alien cultures that are built on racist imagery that shows the Other as subhuman; fist-fights that drag on much longer than necessary; women who exist only to lend a sense of romance and suspense for the man having the adventure.

I love science fiction, but science fiction hasn’t always loved people like me. I forget that sometimes, but I’m reminded of it often, especially when watching movies like this one.