I have a thing for films and television series that feature time travel. This began when Back to the Future was in the cinemas (although I didn’t get to see it then), but has continued on through to today.
I was recently offered some DVDs by a client who was moving house, and in the selection was a couple of time travel films; The Lake House (2006) (which I had already seen but fancied seeing again) and the 1979 film Time After Time (which I had not heard about before).
The Lake House is quite a charming film I think, due in part to the romance starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock (just like in Speed from 1994) and I enjoyed re-watching it. When it came to Time After Time (all about H. G. Wells’ time machine and Jack the Ripper) I found Malcolm McDowell an awkward choice to play the role of H. G. Wells, but was, I suppose it is fair to say, amused to find Mary Steenburgen co-starring in it in similar fashion to her role in Back to the Future III; how she plays (or perhaps just how she is) is almost identical in each; speaking like a love-drunk girl around her Wells/Emmett Brown whilst being a strong-willed and independent kind of woman.
Beyond the Steenburgenness that quite frankly had me giggling, I noticed “ARGO” emblazoned on the front of the time machine and I Bing’d it to find out more. I then discovered The Chronic Argonauts; another story by H. G. Wells that actually pre-dates The Time Machine (I promptly sourced a copy online and downloaded and read it). The Chronic Argo is the name of the time machine here, created by Wells’ character Dr. Moses Nebogipfel, “a mysterious inventor [who moves] to the inward-looking Welsh town of Llyddwdd” not dissimilar in character I suppose to the “crazy wild-eyed scientist” that is Dr Emmett Brown/Doc.
Fast forward a month or so (without the means of a time machine) and I stumble across a trailer for a more recent (2017) TV series of Time After Time, this time brought uptodate by having Wells chasing The Ripper through time to 2017 instead of 1979. Sadly the differences seem to end there; the maker’s pretty much re-package the 1979 film and spread it across an uptodate series, seemingly adding no further imaginative plot lines to provide it with any other purpose of existence. Perhaps the main thing that puts me off watching anything new these days is how everything just seems like bits of other things I’ve already seen with plot-lines that are border-line (if not blatant) plagiarism (unless supposedly they get the rights to do it).
One thing that spikes my curiosity about films and TV series featuring time travel though is the means of travel; the machines, vehicles or methods used. Often there are similarities from one to the other (call it accidental, coincidental, intentional, or a lack of imaginational if you will), or in the case of the original H. G. Wells Time Machine, the 1979 film Time After Time and this more recent series (all supposedly featuring the same machine) there are obvious differences between the machines.
These differences aside though, there are similarities between the machine in this 2017 series and other machines:
- It arrives frosty and cold just like the Delorian in Back to the Future
- It looks similar to/reminded me of the device in the 2012 film Looper
And those are just from what I see in the series trailer. It’s just a shame about the plot outline of the first six episodes available on Wikipedia, the fact the series has both been axed after one series of filming, and that it wasn’t even aired in full in the US (only 5 of the 12), otherwise I might be tempted to seek it out and watch it to scrutinise things further.
By the way, Time After Time was originally a 1979 novel by Alexander Karl (1938-2015), and he went on to publish a sequel, Jaclyn the Ripper, in 2009. Perhaps I’ll seek those out instead at some point.
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