The Time Machine is a remake of HG Wells's classic directed by great-grandson Simon Wells and sadly only loosely based on H G Wells's great novel. Guy Pearce plays Hartdegen, an 1890s New York boffin proposing to his ladylove, when she's fatally attacked by a mugger. Four years on, Hartdegan's created a gleaming time-machine and returns to the past intending to alter the course of true love. Rescued from the mugger, Hartdegan's fiancé succeeds in dying again in double-quick time (is she accident-prone or what?).

Mysteriously Hartdegan then gives up his romantic pursuit and heads into the future, to techno wonderland 2030, then to apocalyptic 2037 and suffering concussion, to the year 802701, where 800,000 years on, life is primitive but luckily people still speak English.

This is the silliest part of the film where predictably, Samantha Mumba provides the love interest playing a nice Eloi native woman who befriends Hartdegan. Suddenly though the nice Eloi farmers become fodder for nasty doglike cannibals called Morlocks and if that wasn't silly enough, you get to see Jeremy Irons looking like he's 103. Then departing again from the novel, perhaps because Hollywood insists that teenagers will only put up with a pat ending, the morlocks get zapped (just in case anyone should go home to have scary dreams, not that the Morlocks are the least bit scary).

What therefore begins as a sedately passable adaptation of the sci-fi classic ends up as a cross between of Battlefield Earth and Planet of the Apes. Special effects reasonable, storyline ridiculous, particularly turning an eccentric boffin turns into an action hero who adores one woman but then falls for another who lives in a weird world where canoes are dragged halfway up a cliff on a daily basis. Wait for the video.