George Pal's The Time Machine

I was in the middle of watching George Pal's film of The Time Machine last night and it came to the bit where it all turns into a proper punch up. There's a full scale barney going on in the year 800,000 and the Time Traveller's socking it to the blue-fanged meanies of the Underworld, those awful Morlocks. It struck me then that it was like somebody's dream about HG Wells's novel. As if someone had just finished reading that strange and thoughtful book and had dropped off and their subconscious had turned it into something a bit more gung-ho and zippy. The same goes for Pal's War of the Worlds. The source material has been transformed somehow into something less about surmising and more about running about and thumping people and blowing them up.

Everything seems like a dream - or like stories that kids would make up in the playground. That's exactly what the Fifties sci-fi films feel like to me - like a bunch of hyperactive kids have got hold of the original stories, and a set of images and ideas to do with aliens and the future and have been set free to tell the stories how they want.

This version of the Time Machine is just lovely, I think. I love this bogus, Hollywoodized London, in which the Time Traveller lives in a cottage with a house keeper somewhere off the King's Road. His friends are there on New Year's Eve at the turn of the twentieth century to sample his port and exclaim, 'Preposterous!' and 'Outrageous!' when he expounds his ideas about travel in the fourth dimension. Funny how, all these years on, and after a whole wealth of tales about time travelling, this story stays fresh. When he unveils his curious invention - all wood, brass, leather and surmounted by a ludicrous wiindmill - we're egging the Time Traveller on to prove himself right.

I found myself quite touched as he goes forward and learns the fate of his best friend and his friend's son, who owns the shop which becomes a vast department store, across the road. Strange, too, to see this 1960 film anticipate a nuclear disaster in 1966. Our hindsight fools us into thinking '1966' onscreen guarantees us stock Carnaby Street swinging London imagery. What we get instead are mushroom clouds and the railway bridge exploding and a mountain of rubble dropped on the Time Traveller's already dusty cottage. It reminded me, shockingly, that this was a 1960 view of future history now: one that had shot straight past the original Edwardian predictions.

The Morlocks and Eloi episode and climax to the film remind me of Star Trek. One of the slightly boring late Sixties episodes in which Kirk falls in love with a dopey woman on a paradisal world and Spock is the only one to realise that something horrible lurks under the ground. There's a touch of the Thals, too, about the Eloi - the pacifist aliens from Terry Nation's original Dalek story in 1963. They, like the Eloi, have to be goaded into giving their oppressors a good thumping. Is that what Time Travellers do? Turn up in other eras to overturn regimes and tell pacifists they've got it all wrong?

I like the way it ends. It's a very romantic, wistful ending. He's off to find his girlfriend in the far-flung future, but who knows? The Time Traveller goes off to explore a new dimension. It's a bit like the strange finale to the Shinking Man story: their futures are indeterminate, but they have found a whole new set of worlds within worlds to check out.

I'm not sure what the best film version of Wells is, now. Has there been a really good one? One that gets him right? I must admit to a fondness for the adaptations of his works that take liberties with teh material - such as this knockabout film, or the Jeff Wayne album of War of the Worlds - or even 'Timelash', which is probably the worst Doctor Who story ever, and the worst ever use of HG Wells's persona and ideas. But I love it nonetheless.

It's like thinking about sf itself, thinking about Wells. He was earnest, serious-minded. He really thought about this stuff and hammered brilliant ideas into elegant stories. But how did it all turn into multi-coloured rubbish, all about fighting and robots and dashing about like kids? I'm not saying that's bad - far from it - I'm just interested.

Reading: I picked up Lev Grossman's The Magician's, at Gene's recommendation. Loving it so far. I've been reading it when I should be doing other stuff. Good sign. Review to follow! Right now, this hidden world of Magicians-in-training seems less like Hogwarts than it initially appears, than it does Boot Camp on the X Factor.