Morlocks

Ok last time Syfy decided to name rape from Lewis Carol's works and now they've decided to pick on H. G. Wells. For God's sake someone buy the Syfy people the Monster Manual II. Still, this isn't too bad by Syfy's standard. Oh sure, they completely got rid of Well's satire of war between the classes, but that's probably for the best. The folks that do Syfy movies probably think a subtext is a very wet book.

So, what we have here is a scientist bloke who used to work for the government. The government and his ex wife want him back. Seems he created a system of time travel that didn't exactly work, but now they perfected it. However, their definition of perfection means that it broke and now there are random holes in time letting in giant people eating monsters who are not called morlocks by the government.

With the fate of humanity at hand the scientist can't say no, so off to the far future. There they find the broken unit, but its in the middle of a nest of ugly bird things. Actually they are more fearsome than the morlocks, but oh well I'll take two monsters for the price of one. There they find somehow the survivors of the first time experiment. Together they try to find and fix the widget and get back to past which is now.

Once back a few twists are put on the plot. First it turns out they weren't thousands of years in the future but a mere sixty three years. Now I don't know what math they are using but it's a doozy since it had to allow for 1) the first experiment to reach sixty two years into the future when they thought they were just going 15 minutes into the future, and 2) the second experiment where they were shooting for 1000 years into the future but somehow only manage to reach sixty three years. That's some odd accounting folks.

Meanwhile, the guy in charge (played by the jerky guy who was the holographic doctor in Star Trek) is using the genetic information to try to save his son dying from cancer. Since it turns out that the Morlocks are mutated humans, and given what we now know about the future, this is some pretty poor decision making in the works. Does no one in fictional universe watch the Planet of the Apes films?

Then of course we get then finale where the time rips start up again and the Morlocks invade the space. The heroes have blow up the time travel device and escape and everyone else is CGI bait. Our heroes end up escaping in the worst CGI animated tank EVAH and all is happy except of course for the coda at the end that shows the Morlock DNA being added to Daddy's son.

Oops.

Overall, the film isn't completely horrible. The beginning is a drag, and the end a confused tangle of plot points, the middle does work fairly well. The CGI is not completely horrible (except for the tank), and the acting is workmanlike. I think it helps that several in the cast worked in several TV shows. They are used to small budgets and cramped production schedules.