It contains new story elements not present in the original novel nor the 1960 film adaptation, including a romantic subplot, a new scenario about how civilization was destroyed, and several new characters, such as an artificially intelligent hologram and a Morlock leader.

Alexander travels to 2037 when the accidental destruction of the Moon by lunar colonists has begun rendering the Earth virtually uninhabitable.

The same night, Alexander and Mara's younger brother, Kalen, dream of a jagged-toothed face and a creature calling their name.

After learning from Vox how to find the Morlocks, Alexander enters their underground lair through an opening that resembles the face in his nightmare.

Alexander meets an intelligent, humanoid Über-Morlock, who explains that Morlocks descend from the humans who went underground after the Moon broke apart, while the Eloi evolved from those who remained on the surface.

The Über-Morlock explains that Alexander cannot alter Emma's fate; her death drove him to build the time machine in the first place; therefore, saving her would be a grandfather paradox.

[5] Simon Wells, who had been directing animated films Spielberg has produced since An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, was interested in getting into live action.

"[6] Despite having never directed a live-action movie before, producers Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald recognized that because of his animation background, the extensive visual effects work on the film wasn't going to be hard for him to handle.

[7] Director Gore Verbinski was brought in to take over the last 18 days of shooting, as Wells was suffering from "extreme exhaustion."

For scenes in which they run on all fours faster than humanly possible, Industrial Light & Magic created CGI versions of the creatures.

In later shots, the effects team used an erosion algorithm to simulate the Earth's landscape changing through the centuries digitally[10] For some of the lighting effects used for the digital time bubble around the time machine, ILM developed an extended-range color format, which they named rgbe (red, green, blue, and an exponent channel) (See Paul E. Debevec and Jitendra Malik, "Recovering High Dynamic Range Radiance Maps from Photographs, Siggraph Proceedings, 1997).

[11] A full score was written by Klaus Badelt, with the recognizable theme being the track "I Don't Belong Here", which was later used in the 2008 Discovery Channel Mini series When We Left Earth.

The site's critical consensus reads, "This Machine has all the razzle-dazzles of modern special effects, but the movie takes a turn for the worst when it switches from a story about lost love to a confusing action-thriller.

He praised actor Guy Pearce's "more eccentric" time traveler and his transition from an awkward intellectual to a man of action.

Jay Carr of the Boston Globe wrote: "The truth is that Wells wasn't that penetrating a writer when it came to probing character or the human heart.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times scorned the film and found the Morlock animation cartoonish and unrealistic because of their manner of leaping and running.

Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle writes, "The far future may be awesome to consider, but from period detail to matters of the heart, this film is most transporting when it stays put in the past.

I can't make [sense of] this idea of studio films where you just get told what to do by people afraid to lose their jobs.