Journey to the Center of Time (1968)

Another day, another David L Hewitt movie.  Journey to the Center of Time (1968) is often described as a remake of another B-movie, The Time Travelers (1964), but this is only partially correct.  It is probably more correct to describe as a 'version' or 'variant' of the earlier film.  The Time Travelers is a well regarded B-movie, directed and written by Ib Melchior.  Hewitt, however, does receive a story credit.  The story goes that the two had a falling out over the film's script, with Melchior fashioning his own version from the original story.  Hewitt subsequently produced his own version of the script, adhering more closely to his original vision, which subsequently became Journey to the Center of Time.  There are certainly a lot of similarities, plot-wise, between the two films.  Both focus on the subject of a group of scientists researching the possibility of viewing future events, then finding that they can actually physically travel into this future.  Both find a war ravaged future earth, but whereas The Time Travelers find the vestiges of humanity underground, battling mutants and building a spaceship to take them to another planet, in Journey to the Center of Time, they find a group of aliens seeking a new planet caught in the crossfire between different human factions.  Their stay in the future is brief and they go careering into the past, overshoot 1968 and end up in prehistoric times, which is represented by a 'jungle' set that looks as if it could fit in my living room and a similarly cramped 'cave' set.  After various shenanigans, the survivors try going back to their own time and find themselves in the same dilemma as their counterparts in The Time Travelers, in an accelerated time stream relative to everyone else, then trapped in a time loop.

The digression in the two versions, plot wise, lies in the later film's digression into the far past.  But there are other significant variations, most notably that, probably due to the briefness of their stay in the future (which forms the main part of the 1964 film), Hewitt's script injects a degree of character conflict by introducing the character of the project's financier as an antagonist to the scientists, his avarice and animosity driving the plot's development.  It is he who causes a paradox by destroying a time craft travelling toward them, out of the past, as they go back to prehistory, not realising that it is him, trying to escape from the past with a cache of ill-gotten precious jewels, for instance.  He is also responsible for the inadvertent trip in time, having pressured the researchers into producing concrete results or face losing their funding.  The result of Hewitt's changes is to move the film through its story at breakneck place at the cost of proper plot and character development.  While in Ib Melchior's film, the trip to the future is the plot, as the tie travelers explore this bleak future and try to help the humans there while simultaneously trying to repair their 'time portal' in order to return to their own time, in Journey to the Center of Time, the trip to the future feels perfunctory.  While the aliens warn them they must go back to the present and stop the development of a devastating laser weapon which will fuel the future wars, (presumably a development of the laser they use as part of their time travel apparatus), nothing is subsequently made of it.  The trip to prehistory is even more perfunctory and feels as if exists purely to pad out the film's running time.  Various talky scenes cutting back to the project control room in 1968, as the rest of the team try to bring the protagonists back to their own time, likewise feel like padding.

The biggest difference between the films, though, lies in their execution.  In The Time Travelers, in spite of an incredibly low budget, Melchior succeeded in fashioning and intriguing and intelligent B-movie, that belies it lack of resources with a slick look and surprisingly good production values.  Its future looks believable and is imaginatively presented.  By contrast, Journey to the Center of Time, in typical Hewitt style, practically screams 'low budget' at the top of its voice.  The simple elegance of the earlier film's 'time portal' is replaced by a spherical time machine with garish bright orange interior decor, (this orange theme extends to the project's control room - a set so cheaply constructed that rather than having back walls, it seems to exist in a black void, a technique Hewitt had also used in Gallery of Horrors).  Despite, according to the dialogue, having already spent millions of dollars, the project's 'time viewer' screen can only show past and future in black and white - possibly because most of the stock footage used to represent other eras comes from films so old that they were made in monochrome.  (The only piece of stock footage from a colour film comes, ironically, from The Time Travelers: the alien spaceship is actually footage of the spaceship the human survivors are building in the earlier film).  For the prehistory sequences, the closest thing we see to a dinosaur is a bit of stock footage of a photographically enlarged lizard from One Million BC, (when the characters are on the - colour- jungle set, we also get a couple of glimpses of a non-photographically enlarged lizard peering through some miniature foliage), so there's no interaction with the humans and consequently no excitement, peril or conflict.

Which, ultimately, the film's biggest problem: despite the fast pace, nothing at all really seems to happen.  Instead, the script just gives us endless talk.  Unfortunately, the dialogue is largely indigestible, full of meaningless jargon, often shouted in order to give the impression that something crucial is happening.  Nothing is ever explained adequately, with the script descending into gibberish every time anyone tries to explain anything technical.  I still have no idea what 'The Center of Time' is or why it is apparently located in the middle of that future war.  Moreover, parts of the plot make no sense whatsoever - how did the time machine return to prehistory when it had been destroyed when the project financier stole it and tried to escape to the future?  It couldn't have been the version that came the other way (as the script implies), as the characters had already arrived in that before it was stolen and destroyed.  Still,the cast, which includes B-movie veterans Scott Brady and Anthony Eisely (a Hewitt regular), struggle gamely with the script's inadequacies and the production's lack of budget.  While Journey to the Center of Time is weirdly fascinating in the way of many of Hewitt's films, Melchior's earlier The Time Travelers is a far superior treatment of the same subject, which transcends its lack of budget through a well thought out script that takes the time to properly explore some of the ideas it raises.