The original was a bittersweet, ironic GeorgePal masterpiece.
The update is ... well, not as bad as the updated PlanetOfTheApes, but horrible. Plainly this is a great film butchered. Let's imagine we have a time machine of our own, and we can go back a few months and kill the FilmButcher before he got cutting. What would the film look like then?
Unspoilers Follow ...
- Obviously we'd have at least one more scene of the time-traveller trying to save his first love from her doom.
- Cut the grand-canyon effect scene. 800,000 years isn't enough time for that, and anyway this footage will be used to much better effect later in the movie. The traveller doesn't get knocked out here either - he just decides he likes the look of 800,000 years in the future, as per the first movie. The knocking out bit we'll save for later too.
- But we do use the ice-age scene here, and the traveller gets mobbed up with the eloi just as you see in the present film ...
- Now those black gooey darts that mysteriously don't kill people ... obviously what was intended is that they transform eloi into morlocks. So the traveller doesn't get hit by one of them.
- But when the traveller goes to save his new friends, he finds them changing tragically and irreversibly. Cut and throw away the ridiculous pool-full-of-skeletons scene.
- Now the JeremyIrons scene. Irons doesn't have the traveller's second sweetie in a cage. Instead she's his willing and gruntish servant. Rapidly filling out with muscle as she gets stupider. This obviously keys off the "genetic resequencing" comment earlier in the film.
- Irons explains why the traveller can't save his original sweetheart - 'cause then he'd never have been motivated to build his machine. He also explains that the genetic alterations weren't evolution, but technology applied to let humans survive the surface destruction.
- Now they have their fight, which goes along the same lines, but it's here that the traveller gets knocked out.
- Okay, now we use the grand-canyon shtick. The traveller goes 6,000,000 years into the future. But when he stops there's no big metal ZarDoz heads. Instead there's ... beautiful rolling green fields, but no humans no place. The traveller looks around him ... and comes to a decision.
- He goes back in time and sacrifices his machine to blow up JeremyIrons before the second sweetie gets morlockized by the black dart.
- Now we have the scene that the whole movie was obviously leading up to. Here it is:
- Second Sweetie: Why'd you do that?
- Traveller: Because he was right. I could never save her. But I could save you.
- They clinch. Closing exposition, audience wipes away tears, roll credits.
- For the DVD include an alternate ending where the traveller gets hit by a black-dart just before he goes to 6,000,000. Then he morlockizes just after he saves 2nd sweetie and gets beaten to death by her newly enlightened tribe.
Really it's a damn shame the FilmButcher did what they did to this film. If I had my way ... --PeterMerel