The Time Machine (2002)
Guy Pearce, Samantha Mumba, Mark Addy; d. Simon Wells and Gore Verbinski; D+

Ladies, Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) is the man of your dreams. He's a twittering science genius at day; at night, he's a twittering, shivering, time traveling romantic. Just get a colleague to remind him and off he goes into the night with his chalk-dusted coat, to some location in New York City, forgetting to buy you flowers but equipped with a ring. But don't expect diamonds, ladies, he'll get you your birthstone instead.

The best thing about this guy isn't that he's a genius, or a perpetually forgetful and nervous man, but that he's dedicated and thinks outside the box. There'll be no bowler hats for him, no sir! When others think time travel is impossible and that it's best to grieve and accept the death of a loved one, he works habitually on proving time travel by actually executing it. And when his fiancée, Emma (Sienna Guillory), dies, what do you think he does? Grieve? Heavens, no! Grieving is for sissies! He does what any genius would do: Attempt to master the past! What a knightly thing to do: Go back into the past to save your loved one from death without fear of ever bumping into your past self, scaring the living Moorlock out of you and your past self!

And ya know what? It doesn't work! He takes her out of the frying and unknowingly puts her in a boiling pot, and somehow figures out, through his underwritten intellect, that if he does it again he'll put her in the oven. So for no apparent reason he decides that the key to mastering the past is to seek knowledge in the future. Don't you just love a man who has no motives, just does things by screenwritten instinct? And don't you just love a man who is a genius but apparently knows less about time travel than philosophers, other scientists, science fiction writers, and fans of Harry Potter?

That doesn't matter. He's a man, a genius of a man; and ladies, let me tell ya, if you love a man who's willing to undergo physical abuse just to save his love then Alexander is definitely the One. He gets beat up not once nor twice but thrice by things twice his size (for all it's worth, in Hollywood the bone-thin Pearce, in theory, is as strong as a diamond). Of those opposers is his own snazzy time machine made of gold and crystal that he probably couldn't afford and was too wrapped up in his work to go out and buy. He goes through all that and doesn't even find the answer to his question; he just finds a sexy native girl (pop star Samantha Mumba) who happens to speak English in a tribal colony in the future.

Interested? Well, the only way you can see him is up on the screen, for if he were to jump out and walk in real life, the moment he turned to his side you wouldn't be able to see him. He's two dimensional, you see. He's got a background and he's got some motives, but both of them are shallow, and we never are really told the who what why and where. And how. And how! And how his lack of dimensions is matched with those of his environment - A 96 minute strip of film. The film is a marvelous looking vessel that Alex sails on through those 96 short minutes on a sea of fluff. But that boat has nothing holding it together, so it just barely floats. It floats solely on the fact that it looks good. And so, in a way, does Alex float because he looks good.

There are things about that boat that don't make sense (like how the stone signs of bridges and buildings and a large computer system can survive 800,000 years of wear and tear, debris from an exploding moon, the heat coming out the middle of the earth, an ice age, and some more stuff; and apparently none of the parties involved seriously sat down and studied theories concerning time travel or even came up with their own legitimate theories about time travel). There are things on that boat that shouldn't be on there (Orlando Jones, who's funny, but should save the United States from that new guy by returning to the 7 Up ads... please). There are things on that boat that are wasted (marvelous special effects, Donald McAlpine, Jeremy Irons... And even Guy Pearce himself). There are things about that boat that, since watching the boat is visually stimulating but mentally unengaging, remind you of other things (Moulin Rouge without the wailing hero; Atlantis with its white mad scientist falling for the native girl of a far and distant tribe; A.I. Artificial Intelligence with its relentlessly obsessive hero who's submerged under frozen water in an ice age while floating through time; A Beautiful Mind with its mathematician bent on finding a truly original idea and thus whitening up his blackboard looking for it; Lord of the Rings with... Well there's too many to name). The boat may look pretty but it's uninteresting merely because it isn't held together properly.

If you chose to follow Alex to his final destination you may be disappointed. You may ask "are we there yet?" when you actually are there. You may wonder how you got there, and you may wonder how it became final. But Alex, he doesn't care. He's such an absentminded gentleman that he chooses not to dwell in the past and ask himself if he ever found out the answer to his question, while the thousands who are secretly joining him on his quest for time travelin' knowledge have a thousand of their own. If his puppet masters were to answer you, they may just say "Shut up and enjoy" when you're far too bored and perplexed to enjoy.

And so, ladies, there you have him: Mad Scientist Alexander Hartdegen, floating away on his pieced together ship and his abusive time machine. If you want him, don't let him get too far! One day he may realize how poorly built his boat was, and realize he never got the answer to his question, and realize how bad a character he is and how bad a vessel The Time Machine is compared to all the other finely tuned vessels Guy Pearce has loaned his talent to, and try to go back in time to save himself, and fall in the sea of fluff and finally snap like a twig.