I'm pretty sure most of the filmmakers never actually read the book. They just saw the previous movie and based the newer one on that.

In fact, recent movies have caused me to wonder whether modern filmmakers actually can read.

I only know the 1960 movie...and while the depiction of the Morlok may not match the book, the horror comes across really well imo. It gave me nightmares for weeks when I first saw it as a kid and it still makes me uncomfortanle to watch as an adult.

I feel those are superficial things than in a condense format (movie) could take the viewer away from the real monsters. So instead of "the movie about some creatures" you would think "the movie about giant monsters".

The monsters are the Morlocks, enslaved humans by the capital, forced to work underground and deprived of their humanity, brutalized, that end up in the top of the food chain.

In yet another premonition of HG Wells the parallelisms with Soviet Russia are uncanny. The masses of brutalized peasantry, finally revolting and devouring the upper class. But the conditions to which they were subjected to hindered them for the coming decades. The brutalization stayed as their way of life; corruption, bribes, abuse of power...

I guess the issue is that it’s sort of like giving a history of the USSR and just stopping in like, the seventies. The Morlocks are definitely monstrous (as where the early Eloi and the humans who evolved into them), but part of the idea of the book is that that monsteresqeness will eventually rob the entire species of its very sapience. It’s hard to talk about the USSR as a state if you don’t talk about how that state collapsed, and the Morlocks are a similar thing.

>The Time Machine isn’t a science fantasy story, it’s a horror story, and it’s entire plot is essentially the author walking into progressively darker and more horrific versions of earth.

My perspective is that's its clearly meant as dystopian fiction rather than horror. H.G. Wells was on the socialist side of the political spectrum for most of his life, and the divide between the Morlocks and Eloi were, at least to me, obviously meant to comment on class war (workers vs capitalist elite/owners of the means of production). But I agree, I don't think I've seen an adaptation that reflects the social commentary side of the story. The message, in either case, is stripped away. Kind of like War of the Worlds was part social commentary on British colonialism.

I definitely agree that it’s dystopian, I guess I’d just argue that those don’t have to necessarily irreconcilable, if that makes sense? Like, it’s definitely leaning towards the class war angle with Morlocks/Eloi, and with the 2100 society in “The Sleeper Wakes,” but I think when it moves to The Grey Man it’s kind of becoming more horror than social commentary, if only because rabbits and centipedes typically lack political prowess. Not to mention that the tentacle creatures at the end are kind of there own thing and I don’t think we learn where they come from, and they’re definitely more in the realm of horror.

Edit: also, when I say horror, part of it is also cosmic horror. Like, the idea of a giant centipede is scary, but not as scary as the idea that human society could eventually cause humans to become those centipedes.

Movies have no interest in faithful adaptations. They're interested in taking the bits that might make a successful movie and changing or leaving the rest.

Yeah, and people are into horror, so why on earth hasn’t anyone done the economically smart thing and combined brand recognition with horror (a notoriously easy genre to get into.)

Because scifi has a far broader appeal than scifi horror. So the economically smart thing to do is what they've been doing. Get rid of the horror and make your movie have broader appeal.

Cost effective investing is the whole reason they got rid of of the horror aspect in the first place.

The problem is that they try to adapt novels, which have too much plot for a movie. First they have to extract a smaller story, then they have to alter it to make it coherent. Novellas would be the ideal thing to adapt, but they don't have the name recognition.

It's not the problem anyway. Movies work very differently than written stories. There's plenty of movies based on short stories with the same non-problem.

Movies will always just take what works, ignore what doesn't and change everything around to make sure it fits a visual medium.