THE TIME MACHINE is a science fiction romance featuring Guy Pearce as the college professor and Samantha Mumba as the love interest. Ms.Mumba lives in the distant future, and resides in a primitive vertical village built into the steep sides of a canyon. The movie features plenty of gee-whiz gizmos. These gizmos will be the delight, especially to children between the ages of eight to fourteen. The opening sequence of the movie takes place in a college and in the professor's laboratory, and the viewer is treated to plenty of gizmos, including an early version of the electric toothbrush. Then, we see the time machine, with its brass fittings and whirling crystalline components. And then, in the distant future, the viewer is treated to a melange of shelters, ladders, windmills, and other devices, all of wood and natural fibers, which belong to the primitive civilization of the Eloi people.In my opinion, the first third of the film is the best part. Mr.Pearce is courting actress Sienna Guillory, in the spare moments that somehow seem to be left free from his busy schedule of teaching and research. The turn-of-the-century society, as shown in the first third of the film, is one of turn-of-the-century prudishness. In one scene, Ms.Guillory is shocked (but happily so) when Mr.Pearce kisses her in public. While at an evening ice skating date, Mr. Pearce presents Ms.Guillory with an engagement ring. Ms.Guillory is not only beautiful, but her lips and cheeks quivver in a fascinating and fetching manner, in response to Mr.Pearce's interest in marriage. Any viewer of this display of little twitches and quivverings of pleasure, will be convinced that such is the stuff of movie actors (and not within the achievable realm of any ordinary amateur actor).At any rate, the viewer's exposure to Ms.Gullory is cut short by a street thug, who slays her by the ice skating pond. Mr.Pearce responds with an expressions of shock and agony. Again, such expressions are within the capabilities of an rare and occasional trained actor, and not within the realm of amateur actors. In response, Mr.Pearce devotes himself to building a time machine, with the goal of traveling back to the past to change what happened. He succeeds, in part, because he is able to meet Ms.Guillory shortly before her demise, and he succeeds further, by convincing her to travel away from the ice skating pond. But alas, she is run over in an accident with a horse-drawn carriage.The film shifts gears, and Mr.Pearce decides to travel forwards in time for an answer, where his goal is still to save Ms.Guillory. What thus occurs is, at least in my opinion, one of the finest sequences in film history. The earlier film from 1960 contains an equivalent sequence, but it is clumsy and clunky compared to this sequence in the Guy Pearce movie. At any rate, the viewer is treated to a particular, static location (Mr. Pearce's laboratory) but where time races forwards by many years. We see a view of the women's shop across the street from the laboratory, where the style of the fashions displayed in the front window is updated every few seconds, where the hemlines rise ever higher. We see a bird's eye view of the laboratory, where small structures are replaced by skyscrapers. Eventually, Mr.Pearce halts his time travel, and finds himself in a modern society where the mining taking place on the moon resulted in an accident where the moon got partially shattered, and is missing a few chunks.This moon scene is one of the cleverest in the history of cinema, in my opinion. An engaging part of this movie, is when Mr.Pearce meets an ordinary young woman with her bicycle. The woman glances at the time machine, parked in an alleyway, and she makes the comment that it looks like a cappuccino machine. (I like cappuccinos and, to my knowledge, this is one of the few existing jokes about cappuccinos. To digress a bit, it might be noted that Gary Larson has a cartoon about lattes, where a cowboy says, "Latte, Jed?") Then, Mr.Pearce leaves the bicycle woman, and continues traveling in time. The viewer is treated to scenes where thousands of years are compressed into a minute, and we see erosion and canyons being formed with the passage of time. Mr.Pearce eventually halts in the far, distant future (the year 802,701 A.D.), where he makes an acquaintance with the Eloi people and the lovely Samantha Mumba. There are many engaging and charming episodes in this part of the movie, when Mr.Pearce gets to know the Eloi people, and where he wins their trust.Much of the rest of the movie concerns the Morlocks and their evil leader, Jeremy Irons. While I did not particularly care for the part of the movie featuring the Morlocks, nothing can be done about this, since they are an integral part of the original TIME MACHINE novel. At any rate, the Morlocks are scary and they jump around like grasshoppers and they chase people, and eventually they eat people (but this eating is not shown). Then, Mr.Pearce hikes down into cave and eventually confronts Mr.Irons. To me, this part of the movie was really stupid. First of all, Mr.Irons just looks like himself but with tons of white makeup. Aside from the gobs of white makeup, there was no attempt to change his morphology from that of a regular human being. To conclude, I enjoy watching the first hour of the movie, periodically, perhaps once a year. The first hour of the movie is a clever, heart-tugging, science fiction romance.