Wells's texts remain an inexhaustible rhizome for intelligent and visually self-aware SF on film and television. To trace the mutation of their influence through post-war films and programmes fully would require a separate study. Suffice it to say that this chapter samples a representative range of both adaptations and influences, focusing on Hollywood versions of several of his best-known scientific romances, as well as less obvious offshoots on British and continental European screens, big and small.

‘The Future Ain't What It Used to Be’: Hollywood Versions of The Time Machine

As we saw in Chapter 1, the concept of a time machine and its synergy with film is a highly effective means for visualising transformations and consequences on an evolutionary scale. By such defamiliarising means, the novella challenges the notion of the white, middle-class, Victorian, male, colonial subject as the measure of human development. The scenario is also, by its very nature, infinitely ‘revisitable’. Consequently, adapting Wells's text necessarily presents directors with a basic choice: to treat it either as a ‘period piece’, for faithful reproduction in every detail (including a ‘future past’ of 802,701, which seems less plausible than in 1895), or as a critical template for each subsequent social era to see its own conflicted image reflected in the future it imagines for itself, with varying degrees of (un)conscious insight into the sources and motives of its own Angst. Hollywood adaptations certainly seem to treat Wells's text as a means both for representing advances in cinematic technology, through their ever more virtual visualisation of time travel, and for projecting topical issues contemporary to their circumstances of making. However, this process involves a peculiar temporal duality: the boundary continually shifts between the retrospectively knowable past (since the novella was published) and whatever hypothetical future succeeds its present. This can be demonstrated by comparing the 1960 George Pal adaptation with the 2002 version directed by Wells's great-grandson, Simon Wells. Both versions use state-of-the-art technology to visualise the process of time-travelling in a highly self-reflexive way, which also alludes to their own prehistory within the developing medium. This inevitably gives rise to a cumulative and ‘dialogic’ layering of both literary and cinematic intertextuality.