unwillingly ignorant said:
What!? The 1960 version was awful!
It was horribly casted.
Like it said it's been a long time, why do you think it was horribly casted? It is a film from nearly 60 years ago; acting styles, roles, tropes and lines are all going to seem dated.
unwillingly ignorant said:
It tottaly missed the sociological predictions. (Part of the point was that there WASN'T a cataclysm to make that future come to be, it was successful capitalism that lead there)
...
It's totaly self obsessed with 1960, making references too the coldwar that don't make any sence.
Combining these two points together this is what I meant about a much later adaptation having to capture the same theme rather than the same substance. When the time machine was published in 1895 the theory of natural selection was still very new and germ theory had only gained traction in the decades previously. The time machine is full of speculation based on those early models and consequently gets things completely wrong. Aside from proposing that all infectious disease could be wiped out so that fruit rotted much more slowly it did what was popular back then and ascribed too much of human culture to simplistic understandings of selection.
By the time of the 1960s evolutionary and social science had progressed very far, to make a completely faithful recounting would be at odds with what was known at the time. In the 60s questionable extrapolations of human society based on evolution wasn't part of the scientific or science fiction zeitgeist. So if you're going to recreate a story in which a protagonist travels into the future to witness a decayed human society, and you can't use the out dated justifications from the original, what are you going to use? Obviously you pick something that seems more realistic and also more relevant.
I've not seen the recent time machine film but I would expect that to make a good one now you would probably find the reason for the decay be based on climate change, working in that some humans stayed hiding underground for tens of thousands of years.
unwillingly ignorant said:
It has the eloi speeking english and looking wrong, (i concede that would have been hard to do, but they could have just used children)
It's pretty hard to find actors that would be so elphin as the eloi are described, as for children you know what they say; "never work with children or animals". More seriously though was the portrayal significantly wrong? Ok so they didn't look exactly right (and tbh a child playing the pseudo-love interest would have been problematic to say the least) but they acted correctly and they represented the correct idea of the eloi; carefree, apathetic, hedonistic, dumb.
As for the language convention it would be pretty hard to make a film where only one character speaks throughout almost the entire thing. Not impossible sure, but it's much easier in a book because the narrator is talking directly to the reader. You get to hear their inner dialogue, their thoughts and feelings. You can't do that so easily on the screen so it would just have been lots of shots of the traveller walking around on his own or talking to himself. If you want a headcanon reason though there were records in the archives, perhaps the eloi learned by watching them.
unwillingly ignorant said:
And it has him traveling back to the future to make a happy ending. (which makes no sense as the butterfly effect would prevent weena's existence)
Doesn't the film end ambiguously? We never seem him back safe in the future do we? It's only slightly different from the book. Also everything we learn in the book and the film suggests that time cannot be altered. The inventor talks over and over again about how time is a dimension no different to space and that traveling through one is analogous to the other. Whilst not explicitly stated it could be the case that in the setting the Self-Consistency principle applies.
Anyho, if at the end of the day you didn't enjoy the film I can't convince you it was good. For you it clearly wasn't. And there are many examples of terrible reboots and much later sequels of films. But when it comes to adapting a book, a very old science fiction one at that, you have to take some liberties with the specifics in order to keep the message and feel of the story as similar as possible whilst telling it in a completely different medium.
