Director: George Pal
Cast: Rod Taylor, Alan Young, Yvette Mimieux, Sebastian Cabot
Have I Seen It Before?: Here’s a deep, dark secret to start off this review. If I have any sort of reputation in this world, it’s as some manner of student of time travel. I’ve written about it ad infinitum, I’ve talked about it, and several are under the assumption that I’ve lived it. When it comes to H.G. Wells’ classic tale, I’ve read it a number of times in various editions, count Time After Time (1979) as one of my favorite films of all time, and have even written a sequel to the adventures of The Time Traveller.
And yet, somehow, no. I’ve never gotten around to seeing this one.
Did I like it?: That’s where the true tragedy of me somehow avoiding this film really comes in. I never got around to this one for no other reason than I always thought it would be too camp, or too geared for children to play to my taste. I’m not sure why I allowed that thinking to stop me, if for no other reason than “too geared for children” or “too campy” is pretty precisely my aesthetic.
Also, the film works. It is visually interesting, with the special effects work in the film rightly garnering an Academy Award, and still largely holding up sixty years later, minus a monorail or two. It goes through all of the beats of the classic story, including the breaking down of the fourth dimension, which inexplicably remains my favorite section of the book. It also does so at a lively pace and offering enough imaginative exploration into the anxieties and fears of the mid-twentieth century, just as much as the novel ruminated on the anxieties of the late nineteenth. There’s really not much more one can expect from an adaptation of the Wells book, or really any time travel story.