Morlocks (2011)

How sad is this?

Good movie but grossly overrated

As Good As It Gets

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

While none would claim "Morlocks" to be an award-worthy film, by Syfy's standards it was good until a few major mistakes ruined all that it had built up.The title is somewhat misleading. It is not a remake of "The Time Machine"; it is more of a reimagining of the main concepts, even moreso than the Guy Pearce remake from 2002.The plot: In 2012, a team of military scientists led by the overbearing, results-oriented Colonel Wichita (Robert Picardo) create a stable, functioning time machine. However, the first mission to the future goes disastrously wrong when the team of soldiers sent to the future find the world completely destroyed before being wiped out by mysterious humanoid creatures, losing the Latch - a small computer device used to control the time machine - in the process.Dr. Radnor (David Hewlett), the former head of the project, is summoned back by current project head - and ex-wife - Angela (Christina Cole) at Wichita's order. After learning that his technology was completed by the remaining scientists, led by Angela and Dr. Felix Watkins (Jim Fyfe), Radnor is tasked with leading a team into the future to find, repair and return the Latch. As their quest gets underway, the mission is complicated by missing soldiers lost in the future, Angela's need of rescue, and looming threats of the creatures - the Morlocks - and Wichita's motives, which are far more personal than the hunt for future weaponry he claimed.The good: Despite being far more generic than the original "Time Machine" story, the film tells a fairly decent story. By Syfy standards the acting is not bad; Hewlett and Picardo turn in solid performances while Jim Fyfe steals his scenes as the mad scientist Dr. Watkins. The main settings - a dreary futuristic army base and the ruins of the future - fit the film's mood.The bad: The usual Syfy creature inconsistencies are present; the Morlocks change size and number repeatedly and their endurance changes based on the demands of the plot.However, this film is undermined by a few fatal errors that create plot holes so large they undermine the entire movie.When Radnor's team first learns of the Morlocks, the soldiers in the future inform them that they learned the name from newspapers they found. However, this undermines the later twist that the "future" is actually only 68 years later, as none of the soldiers ever mention such information despite it being readily available on the papers.Even worse, the rules of time travel are completely broken. Wichita's motive is to obtain a cure from the future for his cancer-ridden son, which he finds in Morlock DNA. This sets up the twist that his son is actually the first Morlock and his transformation is the event that destroyed the future. However, the future exists before Wichita's son was transformed, which is impossible; the Morlock DNA had to be found for his son to transform, but said DNA didn't exist until he transformed and the future was destroyed.

After opening a wormhole into the future, a scientific research team and a military cover try to provide security against a swarm of ravenous creatures that have escaped from the future into the present time.This one definitely has it's moments, namely from the fact that the creatures here are definitely quite vicious and generate some brutal kills for their part, leading to a lot of blood-splatter throughout. The showdown in the lab finale also generates some really intriguing action shootouts due to the overwhelming swarm of creatures appearing and the attempts to take them out, though there is some problems in the fact that there's a little too much CGI in here, as the creatures, bloodshed and various high-tech weaponry are all rather poorly animated and the quantity gets distracting. Also, the technobabble about time-travel and wormholes, with all that scientific jargon, gets confusing after awhile since it doesn't seem to provide any clues as to what's going on and doesn't really help the film out, though this is certainly far from the worst that they've provided.Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Adult Language.

I often find SyFy movies to be mostly awful movies, but I keep watching them for the novelty value and also to see whether they are ever going to make a worthwhile movie to match their TV series. Well actually, they did do The Lost Future, I personally found that surprisingly good if imperfect. Morlocks sadly is to me another bad movie of theirs.Is it their worst? No, Morlocks is nowhere near as unwatchable as Titanic II, Quantum Apocalypse, Battle of Los Angeles, Alien vs. Hunter and 2010: Moby Dick. However it is still not very good. It gets some good points for a good idea and decent turns from Christina Cole and Robert Picardo, though both have shown they can do better with better material.Production values: Pretty lousy really. Morlocks is not the very worst-looking SyFy movie, that's possibly Titanic II, but there's nothing exceptional in how it looks. It is lit in a rather dull way, complete with haphazard editing. The CGI effects are awful, quite possibly the cheapest and most crude effects I've seen in a while, the Morlocks are horribly rendered and don't look scary at all. I do realise that Morlocks, like all of SyFy's resume, is a low-budget film, but I don't think that excuses a lack of quality in the finished products. Like I've said before, it seemed as though they were going for quantity in alternative to quality.Music: Nothing special, in fact rather forgettable and obtrusive even at times. Also a lot of it is in a slow tempo/rhythm, giving a furthermore sluggish feel to the film.Script: To be honest, I wasn't expecting good scripting from SyFy. Even in their few more tolerable efforts, it is one of the weaker assets. It was pretty much what I was anticipating really, cheesy dialogue, a lot of sci-fi babble and technical jargon. In regard to the latter, I got the feeling that even the writers didn't know what they were talking about. The whole "the Morlocks were here" exchange(especially the groan-worthy "because they're American? I don't know" bit) was particularly stupid.Story: Loosely based on HG Wells' The Time Machine, the idea was really good and had the potential to be so. The execution however was bad, worse than bad more than often. The story is told in a very predictable and pedantic fashion, with none of the Morlocks scenes coming across as thrilling, and the build-ups have a complete lack of suspense. Also those looking for an adaptation of The Time Machine will be disappointed, it bears almost no similarity and is no different to almost everything else SyFy has done, complete with contrived motivations and an anti-climatic ending.Direction: One word, incompetent. Far too laid back, with a lot of scenes lazily shot and staged in a clumsy and uninspired manner.Characters: Typical SyFy clichés, the bad guy, heroic officer, beautiful damsel-in-distress and so forth.Acting: Nothing great. Christina Cole is not great, but also not bad, at least she is more than a pretty face. Robert Picardo deserves better, but has some surprising subtlety in his performance. A decent actor David Hewlett may be, but can somebody give him a more interesting character to play, one that isn't too similar to everything else he's done, and one that enables him to do much less than moaning and whining.Overall, not the worst I've seen from SyFy, but it really ruined the potential of one of the better ideas they have ever had. 3/10 Bethany Cox

"Morlocks" are a race from H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine". When I see this in the TV listings, I'm thinking SyFy has come up with a fun new spin on the story. But other than the fact that time travel figures in to the story peripherally, there's no similarity at all. Even for SyFy, known for its dreadful production values, this is an all-time worst.The CGI is so bad it would have been embarrassing in the 90s. Today, it's unforgivable. The director (if they actually had one) gave up even having the actors pretend to fire their guns and just animated muzzle flashes on them--even on the guns that weren't aimed at the enemy.Things like breaking glass and tanks busting through walls look like they were animated by first-week film school students who just started learning CGI.David Hewlett shows that he is perfectly capable of playing the exact same character in everything he does, as does Robert Picardo.I have no idea how I managed to watch the whole thing. But at no point did I consider my time well spent.