Time Machine: Rise of the Morlocks

If I say this is a SyFy flicks then geeks immediately should know that it will be trash. But it's funny that all people who hates SyFy flicks still watch their new ones again and again. The story is mostly okay and when it started I thought, hell yeah, this is going to be a really bloody flick. But after the opening credits the budget was gone I guess and they used some cheap CGI effects to create the 'morlocks'. The stupidest thing is the fact that most of the blood was also CGI. The acting was rather okay but I kept watching it just to see how bad the CGI was. When will SyFy finally spend some money on good CGI? I wasn't involved with the characters at all, do I need to say more? For me no Mor(e)locks.

I often find SyFy movies to be mostly awful movies, but I keep watching them for the novelty value and also to see whether they are ever going to make a worthwhile movie to match their TV series. Well actually, they did do The Lost Future, I personally found that surprisingly good if imperfect. Morlocks sadly is to me another bad movie of theirs.

Is it their worst? No, Morlocks is nowhere near as unwatchable as Titanic II, Quantum Apocalypse, Battle of Los Angeles, Alien vs. Hunter and 2010: Moby Dick. However it is still not very good. It gets some good points for a good idea and decent turns from Christina Cole and Robert Picardo, though both have shown they can do better with better material.

Production values: Pretty lousy really. Morlocks is not the very worst-looking SyFy movie, that's possibly Titanic II, but there's nothing exceptional in how it looks. It is lit in a rather dull way, complete with haphazard editing. The CGI effects are awful, quite possibly the cheapest and most crude effects I've seen in a while, the Morlocks are horribly rendered and don't look scary at all. I do realise that Morlocks, like all of SyFy's resume, is a low-budget film, but I don't think that excuses a lack of quality in the finished products. Like I've said before, it seemed as though they were going for quantity in alternative to quality.

Music: Nothing special, in fact rather forgettable and obtrusive even at times. Also a lot of it is in a slow tempo/rhythm, giving a furthermore sluggish feel to the film.

Script: To be honest, I wasn't expecting good scripting from SyFy. Even in their few more tolerable efforts, it is one of the weaker assets. It was pretty much what I was anticipating really, cheesy dialogue, a lot of sci-fi babble and technical jargon. In regard to the latter, I got the feeling that even the writers didn't know what they were talking about. The whole "the Morlocks were here" exchange(especially the groan-worthy "because they're American? I don't know" bit) was particularly stupid.

Story: Loosely based on HG Wells' The Time Machine, the idea was really good and had the potential to be so. The execution however was bad, worse than bad more than often. The story is told in a very predictable and pedantic fashion, with none of the Morlocks scenes coming across as thrilling, and the build-ups have a complete lack of suspense. Also those looking for an adaptation of The Time Machine will be disappointed, it bears almost no similarity and is no different to almost everything else SyFy has done, complete with contrived motivations and an anti-climatic ending.

Direction: One word, incompetent. Far too laid back, with a lot of scenes lazily shot and staged in a clumsy and uninspired manner.

Characters: Typical SyFy clichés, the bad guy, heroic officer, beautiful damsel-in-distress and so forth.

Acting: Nothing great. Christina Cole is not great, but also not bad, at least she is more than a pretty face. Robert Picardo deserves better, but has some surprising subtlety in his performance. A decent actor David Hewlett may be, but can somebody give him a more interesting character to play, one that isn't too similar to everything else he's done, and one that enables him to do much less than moaning and whining.

Overall, not the worst I've seen from SyFy, but it really ruined the potential of one of the better ideas they have ever had. 3/10 Bethany Cox

In what looks like a war setting, an ugly special effects monster attacks and begins to eat a military man. His companions are also attacked, as they escape. After the opening credits, the setting switches to a book tour with David Hewlett (as James Radnor). He's written a book on time travel. Considered an expert on the subject, Mr. Radnor is summoned by the US Army to go on a mission into the future. The ugly special effects monsters are "Morlocks" from the future. They must be stopped. There are also some Marines lost in the future, who should not be left behind. Meanwhile, in the present, Robert Picardo (as Wichita) schemes...

With almost complete disregard for story-telling, this was adapted from H.G. Wells' classic "The Time Machine" (1895). The conflict between military man Robert Picardo (as Wichita) and DNA scientist Jim Fyfe (as Felix Watkins) is a small highlight. There are millions of people who'd love to make low-budget movies, and the Syfy Channel gets away with airing such wretched wastes of resources. Television anthologies from the 1950s and TV Movies of the Week from the 1960s were more consistently enjoyable. This one should have spent less time on special effects and more time letting us know what was happening in the story.

** Morlocks (9/24/11) Matt Codd ~ David Hewlett, Christina Cole, Robert Picardo, Jim Fyfe

"Morlocks" are a race from H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine". When I see this in the TV listings, I'm thinking SyFy has come up with a fun new spin on the story. But other than the fact that time travel figures in to the story peripherally, there's no similarity at all. Even for SyFy, known for its dreadful production values, this is an all-time worst.

The CGI is so bad it would have been embarrassing in the 90s. Today, it's unforgivable. The director (if they actually had one) gave up even having the actors pretend to fire their guns and just animated muzzle flashes on them--even on the guns that weren't aimed at the enemy.

Things like breaking glass and tanks busting through walls look like they were animated by first-week film school students who just started learning CGI.

David Hewlett shows that he is perfectly capable of playing the exact same character in everything he does, as does Robert Picardo.

I have no idea how I managed to watch the whole thing. But at no point did I consider my time well spent.

The military has constructed a time machine looking to retrieve technology from the future. Instead, they are invaded by vicious creatures called the Morlocks.

It's a Syfy TV movie with a few familiar faces, TV-level CGI, non-descript industrial locations, and a passable connection to the H. G. Wells work. You get what you get. It's a bland B-movie.