The time machine - 2002

It was worse than I thought. Much worse. The ending was absurd, stupid, unreasonably happy. First of all they destroyed the whole moral that can be found in the book, and secondly the story was weak,  the characters were very plain and the ending made no sense, or better, it had the usual sense of creating the happy ending these movies can't be without, with no regard of how right that ending is, or how really happy, for that matter.
The beginning was not bad: Alexander (Guy Pearce) is a 19th century professor who loves inventions and anything about progress and new machines. He's in love with Emma (Sienna Guillory) who had a small role but was actually the nicest thing of the movie.
He proposes to her, she accepts but they are robbed: he is ready to hand his wallet and clock and gloves, but when the robber asks the ring he put on Emma's finger, they fight and a shot is fired: Emma dies. For four years he can only think of one thing: change the past, save Emma. He builds a working time machine and goes back in time: he meets Emma on that same evening, before the 'accident', and takes her away from the robber, but she has a 'different' accident and dies anyway. Alexander understands he cannot save her, and now his new obsession is to understand why he can't change the past. He goes in the future: 2030 people are building on the moon to offer people trips, or houses there, I don't remember. He goes further and the moon is breaking up, due to human actions, and Earth is in chaos, although not the kind of chaos I imagined.
He goes much much further, more than the year 800.000, or something like that, where he finds a different world, where very little remains of the Earth that once was: a few 'rocks' with letters on it, signs that once were in the front of buildings or something like that. Since he was hurt the people called Eloi cured him, then he made friends with Mara (Samantha Mumba) the only one that can understand his language because she studied it on those 'rocks'... sigh. suuure, why not, after all it's not like the rest of the movie makes more sense...
He spends one day with her and the next they are all attacked by strange, ugly monsters that capture some of them, including Mara. Alexander wants to save her, but finds no help in the others who have no intention of fighting. He goes alone, finds out that the Morlock hunt the Eloi like sheep, to eat them. He speaks to their leader (Jeremy Irons) who explains that he has mind powers, to keep the 'hunters' under control, and also tells him that he could not change the past because he built the time machine because Emma died. Without that accident, there would be no time machine at all... then Alexander kills him to free Mara, but now the hunters would have nobody to keep them under control, they would kill them all, so Alexander starts his machine, preparing it to explode, and runs away with Mara. No surprise: they both escape safe and sound, but every single Morlock is killed, disintegrated: very convenient, isn't it?
He stays there, to live with them and with Mara. I don't like this ending, there is no reason why the explosion should destroy all the Morlocks everywhere (at least in this area, there is no indication of the world being inhabited in other places, or by whom. ), and only them! Basically it empties every gallery or mine underneath, but touches nothing on the surface, how kind.
That at the end he should look at a piece of land, with only grass on it, and say: this is where my house was, the kitchen was near those flowers, seems preposterous to me.
The idea that the Eloi would never, years after years, try to defend themselves made sense in the book but not here, if they are people who can tend to themselves, although rather primitive. In the book they could not, they needed the Morlocks as much as the Morlocks needed them, but here the Morlocks are depicted as monsters to kill with no remorse, and the Eloi are supposedly self-sufficient.
At least they appear to make their own houses, their own ships, and to be able to cure themselves...so yeah, a self-sufficient people.
Guy Pearce was not very treat either, this performance is light years away from Memento, or L.A.Confidential, he sort of had one expression always, only the make up changed: so neat when he proposed, so messy when he was grieving-creating the time machine, so wild when he was with the Eloi, fighting for their freedom.
I liked Phyllida Law as Mrs Watchit, but it was a very small role and unimportant character.
The concept that he could not change the past should have also prevented him from meeting her when he went back in time, because he DID change the past, in a way; what memories does he have now, of the robbery or of not having found her that night only to find out later that she had been killed away from the place of your date? It's impossible to change the past, full stop. It is because if something happened in the past, it already happened, it can not be 'yet to happen'. Okay, in a movie called the time machine, I must accept from the start that time travel is possible, and not complain about it, but I didn't at first, I did only when they started to reason about it in a stupid way. They should take a side and stick to it: to travel back in time must be either possible or not, just make a decision!