I'm struggling to figure out how to talk about this one. "The Time Machine" is a story that, upon revisiting it, evokes really clear memories. A close friend from high school lent it to me; I kept it in my backpack for roughly a month and then...during a field trip to The Board of Trade, I pulled it out and read it on the train. It was one of those narratives so brief that I could finish it during the hour and fifteen minutes between our town and Chicago. Even now, whenever I return to it, it transports me back to 1997, and I still distinctly recall finishing it around the time the train arrived, remembering how stepping into the bustling city felt like entering a different reality. The story had pulled me so far from my everyday life that Chicago seemed almost shocking. Then they adapted it into a movie, a reimagining of an earlier film, and watching it, I don't know, I didn’t get that same sense of being somewhere completely detached from everything that the book gave me... And in my view, this movie needed to capture some small part of that experience. Or at least provide that feeling you get when you walk out of a film and realize it had rained. It's an absorbing story, but "The Time Machine" didn’t carry me away like the book did. I can't help but feel it deserved something better. It felt like watching just another movie, and honestly, it gave me the same impression that Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” did—it seemed to be trying hard and failing miserably. I walked out feeling indifferent, which is surprising considering how excited I was going in; I read the story in 1997 and they made the film in 2002, so I was expecting a similar experience. I’d waited long enough. I guess I might be being too critical simply because I connected with the story so deeply the first time I read it, and now, as an adult, instead of transporting me to another world, it takes me back to 1997, to high school, and that hour-and-fifteen-minute train ride to Chicago. Ultimately, it might be a reasonably good film that I just dislike because the story had such a profound impact on me when I first encountered it.

Source on TMDB