So much time, so little substance

"Do I surprise you?" drawls Jeremy Irons in The Time Machine, adding: "I wasn't always like this." No indeed: an albino cannibal Uber-Morlock in a white horsehair wig with black lipstick isn't the usual Irons persona; though now we think of it, he did play the Archmage Profion, got up like a birthday-party conjurer for Gothic kiddies, in Dungeons and Dragons.

Irons must like standing staidly in costume while his talents go to waste as routine SFX are computerised around him months later, orating an incomprehensible explanation of why history can't be altered by taking a step back in time. Would it could, and had made this movie shorter.

Directed by Simon Wells, it makes a total muddle of his great-grandfather HG Wells's novel about a Futureworld where the Morlocks, underground predators who here look like leftovers from Planet of the Apes and move like first-drafts of raptors in Jurassic Park, prey on the light-loving Eloi, who look like spaced-out flower children. Their leaderette, played by a nimble Irish pop star improbably called Samantha Mumba, is the exception, resembling a Tahitian native girl. She has picked up English from bits and pieces of municipal signposting ("7th Avenue Baptist Church..." "Tiffany and Co") that have survived from old New York.

Scenes showing that city being struck by the Moon cracking up - they are rumoured to have included the ruin of the World Trade Center - have been brutally truncated. Guy Pearce has a thankless role as the inventor of the Time Machine, a vintage vehicle that is given no build-up at all, and performs only a perfunctory commuting role. Pearce is burdened with an introductory plotlet leading nowhere when his fiancée (Sienna Guillory) in New York, circa 1900, is killed by a Central Park mugger and is then killed again by a bolting horse when he goes back in time to save her life by altering events. Not a healthy chap to be around, the Time Traveller.

The most inventive sequence shows the New York Public Library in 2023, stocked with a single black information officer in hologram format (Orlando Jones) who claims to be the repository of all human knowledge. He refers to Wells's novel, George Pal's 1960 film version of it and a musical (still unknown to us in 2002) by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer is the only other work of literature to survive the holocaust. It's apparently "book choice" in Eloi-land, where public readings from it go on for eternity.

The Time Machine itself is turned into a bomb that blows up the Morlock kingdom. "It's only a machine," says its inventor unsentimentally, settling down for all time with Ms Mumba. When it's love versus science, Hollywood knows where to put its money.

The Time Machine
Cert: PG