About the Movie
London, 1893. H. G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) has built an actual time machine, and he is demonstrating it to his dinner guests when Scotland Yard arrives with terrible news: one of those guests is Jack the Ripper. The killer, Dr. John Leslie Stevenson (David Warner), escapes the police by taking the machine — to San Francisco, 1979, a city he finds very much to his liking. Wells follows, carrying a novelist’s faith that the future must be a utopia, and lands in a world of television violence, fast food, and a Ripper who feels right at home.
Writer-director Nicholas Meyer builds the film as three stories braided together: a chase, a fish-out-of-water comedy, and a romance. Banker Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen) meets a strange, polite Englishman who claims to be hunting a murderer, and their scenes together give the thriller its heart — she is modern, funny, and entirely capable of rescuing herself. Warner, meanwhile, is genuinely frightening: calm, amused, and convinced that 1893 called him a monster while 1979 simply calls him an average man. At 1 hour 52 minutes, it is charming and sinister in equal measure.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Time After Time was one of the first films to treat a famous author’s own invention as the doorway into his story — Wells does not just write about the time machine, he has to live with having built it. That meta twist, plus the culture-shock structure of a Victorian optimist confronting the violent century he helped imagine, became a template that time-travel stories have reused ever since, from novels to television series that borrowed even its title.
It also launched two careers in style: Meyer went on to direct Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI, carrying this film’s wit and literary confidence with him, and McDowell and Steenburgen’s on-screen romance became a real one — they married the following year. A small film with a perfect premise, executed with unusual warmth.
