George Pal
L'Uomo Che Visse Nel Futuro (The Time Machine)

LA RECENSIONE

Here's a holiday movie for this Christmas, let's become children again and be swept away by naive and miraculous "special" effects that now seem like Melies: from H.G. Wells' 1931 story, in this free adaptation, one can sense the atmosphere of the great inventors of the 20th century, a bit mad and a bit like apprentice sorcerers. The protagonist, George, a lord from the Victorian era (played by a superb Rod Taylor - already in Hitchcock's "The Birds") on the eve of New Year 1900, with a completely analog, art-deco decorated and handcrafted time machine with a motor that looks like a mega-turntable, shifts gears and from his room with a view begins to wander into the future, through the two world wars - 1917, 1940 - landing in 1966 and finally reaching 802,701.

In that very distant future, after immense catastrophes, humans are divided into only two major classes: the Eloy and the Warlock. The first resemble spoiled children, tall, beautiful, and aristocratic, with no past and no future, intent on sweet idleness from dawn to dusk... After all, there are those who work for them, the Warlock, brutal and bloodthirsty yetis, more beast-like than human.
The Eloy seem apparently happy in a land that has become like an earthly paradise; and they have even freed themselves of music, TV, etc., etc.: documents of voices and sounds from the distant past are recorded on metal rings rotated on a machine that emits light upon contact with the medium; a beautiful intuition of the laser and the compact. The sole disturbance to their pacifist happiness is that the stronger Warlock feed on some of the Eloy, calling them with a hypnotic siren. George rebels and furthermore falls in love with the charming Weena (Yvette Mimieux), becoming the promoter of the Eloy revolution....

So, a beautiful science fiction film, remarkable for the means of the time, which nevertheless raises questions about the actual possibility of time travel; perhaps in the myth of the wheel turning on itself, at prodigious and super-relativistic speeds, there is a glimpse of something that in UFO propulsion might already be reality.