Okay, so it's not like the book, there's more then a few little breaks in logic, and one little continuity error (watch when the computer image in the far future reaches past his display screen to touch the skull), but is it entertainment? This version of the famous novel is different from the previous film version though the key names are the same. Updated a bit to account for our own recent history (no chance of a big enough war anymore, so let's have the moon break up), the future still has the same contest between Morlocks and Eloi.

There's one part with the tired old message that technology will always lead us to a bad end, of which I'm tired of hearing (it's never science or technology that do things in but the wisdom of man using it- duh!), and a little temporal problem our hero can't get past in order to give him an excuse to go time traveling some more. While they have their own explanation as to why he can't ever save his girl friend's life (if he saved her then he'd nver have a reason to mak a time machine), there IS a way past it- go back and give himself a note saying in essence: "don't go in the park or she'll die, and by the way make a time machine so you can come back and give yourself this note." There, problem solved.

Of course we wouldn't have a movie then, so I guess that part's passable- or they could have just followed the book wherein the motivation was just good old fashioned curiosity. For the rest of it, once they got to the Morlock-Eloi future things were going good. I loved the hanging cliff villiage as a visual and setting, and the orlock getups were nice and threatening. I hear the director (great grandson of H.G. Wells) was having headaches trying to visualize an advanced enough future, but there's enough SF autors out there he could have brought in for that job. I think he was more comfortable once he was in the Morlock parts.

In balance, it's not as bad as some people say, though it could have been far better. If a book is considered a classic then there's usually a reason, so why not just use the book as the script? Anyway, I guess it's worth a good matinee'.