You Know a Movie Fails When You End Up Siding With the Villain...
SPOILERS AHEAD...
I mean what the hell, Alexander made every wrong decision possible, we're expected to believe by the end of the film that he's a changed man but he did the exact same thing he did with Emma's death (confronting the mugger instead of letting him have the ring) and acted rashly by murdering the Uber-Morlock who had the courtesy to give him his answer, return his machine, and allow him to leave without any violence. Literally everything the Uber-Morlock says is right on the money, he even out-argues Alexander by suggesting his own Time Machine is just as much a perversion of natural law and an attempt to control the world as anything he's doing. I think the writers accidentally convinced many of us to side with the villain. But no, Alexander decides his 20th century morality trumps that of 800,000 years of evolution and attempts genocide (unsuccessfully, since that's only one clan among many), only for the movie to end as though everything's fine and dandy. There's a bajillion different and better ways he could've done things not only to save Emma (give the Time Machine plans to his younger self and explain that he has to build it and why, for example, this would avoid any ensuing paradox caused by Emma's survival) but to change the bleak future such as preventing the Lunar Leisure Living catastrophe which "broke up the moon" (ugh) from ever happening.
I mean come on writers, you have a time machine and this is the best you can do? The sad part is that it had flashes of brilliance here and there, for example the score was probably the most impressive part of the movie with its scope and crescendos and the effects were pretty decent at times, plus I liked the idea that the Time Traveller had a deeper and more personal reason for designing the machine which gave the film a nice emotional touch. But even then, we barely get to know Emma so we don't really care if she dies, and the same goes for the other characters including Samantha Mumba who plays... thingy, see I can't even remember her name, Maura or Mara or some crap. Hell, Weena from the original was more memorable and she basically just sat there and looked hot.
To me, movies that have massive potential but crash painfully are even more irritating to me because you see what could've been, at least films that are destined to be bad or which are poor from start to finish you can just let it go but these movies leave you wanting - someone please adapt this novel properly, it's begging for a good director and writer.
Valar morghulis