The Third Annual James Proclaims Advent Calendar of Christmas(ish) Films – Door 14

We’re up to door 14 The Third Annual James Proclaims Advent Calendar of Christmas(ish) Films and it’s as if time is literally flying by as we head toward Christmas.

Maybe we could do with a time machine. Like the one in 2002’s The Time Machine.

Although it doesn’t seem to be the most reliable of devices, so maybe it’s best avoided.

The Time Machine is adapted from the H.G. Wells’ novel of the same name. Which I haven’t read, although it is exactly the kind of thing I would read because I like to occassionally  sample a smattering of the classics for entirely pretentious reasons.

But in this case  I haven’t, so I watched this movie without any knowledge of its source material. I don’t know if that in any way hampered my enjoyment but it seems unlikely.

It was directed by Well’s great grandson. I don’t suppose we can accuse the author of nepotism because he died some 56 years before this film was made. But obviously being a direct descendant might have swung the gig for Simon Wells. Although he’s been involved in a few animated features in his time, The Time Machine  remains his only live-action movie. And rightly so, because it is rubbish.

I didn’t hate it though. It’s disjointed and muddled with enough plot-holes to make a decent metaphorical golf course, but it all pretty inoffensive and, it it’s own flawed way it is strangely quite charming.

But to be clear, not good in any way.

 

Score for Christmasishness

Quite a lot of the film is set in some weird dystopian future where Christmas probably isn’t even a thing, but the beginning is set in New York at the end of the 19th century and here ’tis very much the season. Indeed it’s all rather lovely until things take a turn for the darker. Then it’s less lovely. But still fairly Christmas(ish). Until the time travelling begins in earnest. Then it isn’t at all.