The Time Machine

Plot synopsis:
The book's protagonist is an English scientist and gentleman inventor living in Richmond, Surrey, in Victorian England, and identified by a narrator simply as the Time Traveller. The narrator recounts the Traveller's lecture to his weekly dinner guests that time is simply a fourth dimension and his demonstration of a tabletop model machine for travelling through it. He reveals that he has built a machine capable of carrying a person through time, and returns at dinner the following week to recount a remarkable tale, becoming the new narrator.
In the new narrative, the Time Traveller tests his device with a journey that takes him to A.D. 802,701, where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, elegant, childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings, doing no work and having a frugivorous diet. His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline, and he speculates that they are a peaceful, communist society, the result of humanity conquering nature with technology, and subsequently evolving to adapt to an environment in which strength and intellect are no longer advantageous to survival.
Returning to the site where he arrived, the Time Traveller is shocked to find his time machine missing and eventually concludes that it has been dragged by some unknown party into a nearby structure with heavy doors, locked from the inside, which resembles a Sphinx. Luckily, he had removed the machine's levers before leaving it (the time machine being unable to travel through time without them). Later in the dark, he is approached menacingly by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Within their dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the leisured classes have become the ineffectual Eloi, and the downtrodden working classes have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks. Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores the Morlock tunnels, learning that due to a lack of any other means of sustenance, they feed on the Eloi. His revised analysis is that their relationship is not one of lords and servants but of livestock and ranchers. The Time Traveller theorizes that intelligence is the result of and response to danger; with no real challenges facing the Eloi, they have lost the spirit, intelligence, and physical fitness of humanity at its peak.
Meanwhile, he saves an Eloi named Weena from drowning as none of the other Eloi take any notice of her plight, and they develop an innocently affectionate relationship over the course of several days. He takes Weena with him on an expedition to a distant structure that turns out to be the remains of a museum, where he finds a fresh supply of matches and fashions a crude weapon against Morlocks, whom he must fight to get back his machine. He plans to take Weena back to his own time. Because the long and tiring journey back to Weena's home is too much for them, they stop in the forest, and they are then overcome by Morlocks in the night, and Weena faints. The Traveller escapes when a small fire he had left behind them to distract the Morlocks catches up to them as a forest fire; Weena and the pursuing Morlocks are lost in the fire, and the Time Traveler is devastated over his loss.
The Morlocks open the Sphinx and use the time machine as bait to capture the Traveller, not understanding that he will use it to escape. He reattaches the levers before he travels further ahead to roughly 30 million years from his own time. There he sees some of the last living things on a dying Earth: menacing reddish crab-like creatures slowly wandering the blood-red beaches chasing enormous butterflies in a world covered in simple lichenous vegetation. He continues to make short jumps through time, seeing Earth's rotation gradually cease and the sun grow larger, redder, and dimmer, and the world falling silent and freezing as the last degenerate living things die out.
Overwhelmed, he goes back to the machine and returns to Victorian time, arriving at his laboratory just three hours after he originally left. Interrupting dinner, he relates his adventures to his disbelieving visitors, producing as evidence two strange white flowers Weena had put in his pocket. The original narrator then takes over and relates that he returned to the Time Traveller's house the next day, finding him preparing for another journey. After promising to return in a short period of time, the narrator reveals that after 3 years of waiting, the Time Traveller has never returned.

Tags: sci-fi

Review:
I Have A Confession To Make .... ...... And that is I'm " reviewing " something I have never seen . If the IMDb don't accept this review I perfectly understand because we don't want to open the floodgates where people submit things they haven't seen , though I have seen many reviews ( Before the ten lines minimum rule was introduced ) we're about three lines long stating " I'd rather get my legs chopped that have to watch this again . 90 minutes of my life that I'll never get back " which led me to the conclusion that these comments were written by someone who had never seen the movie they were ranting about . Hopefully what I'm about to write is far more informative and literary respectable than that I've seen transcripts and still photos from this live teleplay and if you haven't seen it on its original broadcast from 1949 trust me you'll never see it now because in those days film recording for television wasn't done , in those days things were broadcast live and that was it , nothing was kept for posterity , and it wasn't until 1953 that the BBC put forward the idea of recording their dramas , something that was resisted by the unions which meant the final four episodes of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT were the victim of an industrial dispute at the BBC hence they weren't recorded for the archives This teleplay is faithful to the book for the most part . You know these memorable scenes from the two movies where the traveler stops and has a walk around ? These don't actually appear in Wells novel which starts with a long talky sequence of the time traveler ( he's not named on screen ) inviting a few of his friends along to his house to discuss this brilliant invention - A time machine . Obviously his associates think he's mad and leave the house so the traveler decides to try out his invention and finds himself in the year 802,701 AD where he becomes embroiled amongst the politics of the Eloi and Morlocks . After trying in vain to save an Eloi girl called Weena from the Morlocks he then travels forwards through time where the sun turns supernova and destroys the planet . After witnessing this he goes back through time to the date where he last spoke to his friends who are now convinced he is mad until he pulls out a strange flower he was given by Weena . This last sequence is the only major deviation from the source novel It might seem like a seriously daft idea to produce an effects driven live TV drama in 1949 but from what I've seen in photos the director Robert Barr seems to have done his best to make it work . I know something like QUATERMASS 2 is laughably bad when viewed today but much of that's down to over ambition . This version of THE TIME MACHINE required only a couple of sets and all of the effects were achieved through back projection which when you've got 405 line monochrome television with a weak broadcast signal probably would have appeared very acceptable to viewers at the time and much of the set design in not unimpressive though the time machine itself looks like a cross between a cammode and a hairdryer !. The Time Machine - broadcasted on BBC on Tuesday 25th January 1949. It is doubtful whether anyone who was born after 1949 could lay claim to having watched this version of the H.G. Wells thought provoking novel, "The Time Machine".However, it would be nice to see how this much appraised production was made, especially when it is believed to have been made so close to the original novel.As well as having read the original novel twice, I have only seen two versions of this, none which are anything like the book, so a remake of this television play, using the only available techniques that were about in 1949, would be interesting to watch.. response to Theo (mrs.) Robinson's comment on 1949 time machine. Theo writes: "This version of THE TIME MACHINE required only a couple of sets and all of the effects were achieved through back projection which when you've got 405 line monochrome television with a weak broadcast signal probably would have appeared very acceptable to viewers at the time and much of the set design in not unimpressive though the time machine itself looks like a cross between a commode and a hairdryer !".....Huh?Well teddy boy, the movie is a thinker, which you, my friend, are not! You are a Disneyite, and see things only on the surface. If what the time machine looks like, is all that matters to you, I suggest sitting down and actually look at this film, or, maybe pick up the book,(that has no photos), and pay attention to the message/statement H.G.Wells is making.regards, ghart56@cox.net