The Time Machine

Hoping to alter the events of the past, a 19th-century inventor instead travels 800,000 years into the future, where he finds mankind divided into two warring races.

Critics largely dismissed this adaptation as a visually busy but narratively hollow adventure, faulting the pivot from a romantic premise into muddled action-thriller territory. The period recreation of turn-of-the-century New York drew warmer notices than the far-future sequences, and even the special effects split opinion — some found them dazzling, others thought the Morlock animation unconvincing. Guy Pearce's performance attracted mild praise from a handful of reviewers, though the film was broadly seen as a missed opportunity to deepen its source material.