Prominent Social Anxieties Adapted: Three Film Adaptations of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine

Abstract

My thesis is concerned with three different film adaptation of H.G. Wells’s classic novella The Time Machine (1895). These adaptations are George Pal’s feature The Time Machine (1960), Henning Schellerup’s telefilm The Time Machine (1978), and Simon Wells’s Hollywood blockbuster The Time Machine (2002). There are certain elements in the source text that I identify as important that a film should engage with if it is likely to be considered an adaptation of The Time Machine. Absolute fidelity to the source text is not a requirement, I believe, to be an effective adaptation, but adaptations do need to respect the source text, especially an admired classic like The Time Machine. Like The Time Machine itself, each adaptation is a product of the historical context that it was created in. Accordingly, each adaptation, to be effective, should update its characters and plot to engage with a prominent social anxiety that is relevant to its audience at the time of production. Despite this updating, each adaptation should pay respect to the source text, and prior effective adaptations where appropriate. While I conclude that all three adaptations achieve a measure of aesthetic success, this success decreases as we approach the present.