The Time Machine (2002)

[Watched the 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine last night and was sort of horrified by the first third of it.] 

The film feels the need to give the Time Traveller (here named Alex Hartegan) a motivation for inventing the time machine other than pure scientific curiosity.  And so they give him a beloved, Emma, who, on the eve of their engagement, is murdered by a mugger who wants her engagement ring.  Stricken with grief, Hartegan obsesses over finding a way to change the past so that he may go back in time and prevent Emma's death. 

Not only does this new romantic motivation replace the scientific one, it actively deters it or represents it as socially unacceptable.  The film casts Hartegan's scientific curiosity as a distraction from his courtship of Emma - his work as an academic makes him late for his date, he forgets to bring her flowers because he stops to examine a stranger's cutting motor car on the street, for which she playfully chastises him, and his best friend, Filby makes similar comments about how he would be better off focusing on Emma rather than his crazy inventions. 

There's a lot to say here about the hegemonic discourse promoting the importance of heterosexual love which is the supreme generative force, even surpassing scientific innovation and progress.  But more specifically and more importantly, this addition to the adaptation reflects back on Wells' text in a way that emphasizes the novel's contribution to the late Victorian tendency to question the nature of reality for its own sake.  The novel begins in medias res, with the Time Traveller already part way through lecturing his dinner party on notions of time and space.  While the 1960 adaptation starring Rod Taylor does not begin exactly in this moment, it does begin with the dinner party scene where the Time Traveller explicates the fourth dimension - time - and unveils his time machine, which, unlike the 2002 adaptation, portrays the Time Traveller as investigating time travel purely as a way of debunking common assumptions about reality. 

[Below is an important quote for this, but I will probably use it earlier in the non film section of the chapter.] 

"You must follow me carefully.  I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted.  The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception" (Wells 1). 

[The take-away from this is that he's challenging assumptions about the nature of reality that are "universally accepted."]