• Primary Blog Question
  • When compared, the two film clips help illuminate a key question for this course: How has our relationship to technology changed over time?

The two films, while set in the same time period (1899-1900 to begin), illustrate the discrepant expectations of each film’s target audiences with their releases in 1960 and 2002, respectively.  The first version, released in 1960, stars Rod Taylor in the role of the Time Traveler.  Following the original H.G. Wells text closely, the Time Traveler character is tasked with convincing his colleagues (and through them, the audience) of the existence of the fourth dimension, and spends a great deal of time arguing that time travel is possible.

The second version of the film, released in 2002, features Guy Pearce as the Time Traveler, and moves away from this close adherence to the book’s narrative.  Instead of arguing for the possibility of time travel and the existence of the fourth dimension, this film opens with a heart-wrenching tale in which the Time Traveler, a professor of mechanical engineering, finds himself in a heart-wrenching situation in which he believes time travel will allow him to solve a problem.

What I found most interesting is the fact that these two films illustrate from the very start the Time Traveler’s relationship with technology and raise questions for the audience to consider.  The audience of 1960 is asked to wrestle with conceptualizing dimensions of space-time and concerns about ownership and profit of technological innovations.  The audience of 2002, in contrast, is tasked with considering the possible implications of time travel, including whether or not the past/present can be changed in the future.

• Secondary Blog Questions
  • How has film technology changed?
  • How have we changed as film viewers?
  • How has our understanding of time evolved?
  • How does fiction/science fiction impact our relationship to technology?