When I was teaching at Smoky Hill High School, my favorite class of the day was
Science Fiction. It was all juniors and seniors, it was a subject I was
personally thrilled with and it gave me the opportunity to push the envelope on
subject matter a little bit. We read a lot of cool stuff and saw even cooler
movies. The curriculum included Altered States, Alien and Blade
Runner among others. For a lot of these suburban kids it was the first time
they had pondered ideas like the endlessness of time and space, mortality and
the ethics of artificial life. I think it’s safe to say minds were blown. One
of the movies that had the biggest impact on the kids however was a sweet,
small love story that uses the life of author H.G. Wells and his social and
scientific theories as a backdrop. Time After Time stars Malcolm
McDowell as the great author H.G. Wells, a social engineer whose beliefs in
scientific innovation, women’s liberation and utopian idealism informed his
journalism and fiction. Works like War Of The Worlds, The Invisible
Man and The Time Machine informed the thematic underpinnings of all
Science Fiction to come. Time After Time cleverly weaves the historic
facts of Wells’ life along with his own fictional ideas and a modern, romantic
twist to create an irresistible, romantic journey through time. 
In this version of Wells’ life, he has actually built a time machine himself,
yet he doesn’t have the nerve to try it out. His hand is forced when, during a
dinner party, his friend, Dr. John Leslie Stevenson, steals it and escapes into
the future. It turns out that Dr. Stevenson is, in actuality, Jack The Ripper,
and H.G. Wells, a utopian dreamer, has inadvertently unleashed a madman on the
future. His hand forced, Wells follows The Ripper into the future to prevent
the killer from ruining utopia. Landing in 1979 San Francisco (where the Time
Machine is part of a museum display on Wells) the first third of the movie
shows the befuddled Wells trying to rectify his utopian hopes about the future
with the less than enlightened realities of 1979 America. He is shocked by the
callous violence, rampant consumerism and breakneck pace of the modern world.
As his hopes for the brave new world fade he is gripped by his need to stop The
Ripper from carrying out his murders, which have already started, anew. Using
classic detective work he finds The Ripper and at the same time meets a banker
(Mary Steenburgen) with whom he begins an affair, while unwittingly setting her
up as bait for Dr. Stevenson’s murderous plans. The die is cast and Wells now
realizes he personally is responsible for unleashing a terrible danger on all
of eternity and at the same time he has imperiled the woman he loves.
Time After Time
succeeds on almost every level at providing timeless entertainment. With expert pacing, the movie hurtles to a final confrontation between Wells
and Stevenson (played with a perfect mix of intelligence and menace by the
great David Warner). McDowell is a fantastic combination of befuddled professor
and genius inventor, equal parts world saver and little boy lost as he stumbles
his way through the modern world trying to save the past and future. The movie
teeters nicely between science fiction themes and romantic overtones. McDowell
and Steenburgen were in the middle of a real-life love affair during the making
of this movie and the sparks between them feel extremely real. Wells’ growing
desperation to find The Ripper, save Steenburgen, and right the balance of
history is palpable and thrilling. The students in my Science Fiction class
couldn’t wait to see what happened and loved the discussions we would have
about the elasticity of time and the consequences of messing with the fabric of
history. Without tons of special effects, without any explicit violence or sex
and with a deep
- Paul Epstein
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