Film Review - The Time Travellers (1964)

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spoiler alerts Prophets of Doom suggesting dates for the end of the World most commonly suggest a doomsday date coming very soon. The threat that the World will end in 66 billion years-time isn’t going to worry anyone now. For film makers, the danger of human extinction is likewise essentially to be imminent. Science fiction authors have often used the conceit of time travel to let travelling scientists observe and experience a future apocalypse. H G Well’s 1895 novella version of The Time Machine takes its traveller to see three stages on the road to total oblivion for all life. He witnesses how the bourgeoisie have evolved into the effete passive, lethargic Eloi being picked off by the aggressive Morlocks who have evolved from the proletariat. The 1960 George Pal Movie version of the story fails to show the final future vision of the now reunited in one form Morlock & Eloi entity – a crab like creature, melting as the Sun boils away the planet. It is an indirect result of the traveller’s interference in their past that they have ended up this way though the heat death of the planet they / it experience is inescapable. Ib Melchior’s under-rated and rarely seen B-movie gem The Time Travellers, starring Preston Foster, implicates Time Travellers even more in our not too far away doom (with the end set for 2071). In the film, scientists in the end-period 2071 have created a giant TV-Screen with a difference. It lets them watch the far flung future live as it happens. As their experimental tech is draining vast amounts of scarce national energy, a government official turns up to try to persuade them to shut their big-screen down. In examining the apparatus closely, he finds out that it is a window they can step through directly into the far-flung future (the date of which is never given). The researchers can’t resist going walkabout in the future but behind them their screen shuts down, trapping them, so after they overcome the dictatorship of the future they use the highly advanced technology there to build a new portal in order to get back to their own time just before they set off. In doing so, they end up time-looping themselves, racing through the entire film again, over and over at increasingly rapid speeds until the film and in effect time itself seems to evaporate. A clever, under-employed doomsday scenario, looking like a glossy extended episode of The Twilight Zone. Arthur Chappell