This was a childhood favourite of mine (I think I was ten), and it was a pleasant surprise to see it again as an adult (properly this time, on the big screen) and find it really was as good as I'd remembered and hoped. I'd never have guessed that this was Nicholas Meyer's first time as a director. He was fortunate in his talent, of course, having himself as a writer, Miklós Rózsa as a composer, and Mary Steenburgen and Malcolm McDowell both convincing and enchanting us as the two lovers (McDowell, in particular, hits the right notes so perfectly that when you see him plead, with tears in his eyes, at the end, you feel the urge to do the same thing yourself).
An earlier writer regretted that Meyer didn't have his hero travel back in time in an attempt to prevent Jack the Ripper's crimes before they were committed (and even went so far as to blame this "failing" on the absence of CGI!), and I suppose that if I'd been a fan of incoherent cliché, I would have been disappointed, too. But this is a film, thank goodness, that takes itself seriously. There's no nonsense about changing the past. H.G. Wells (some spoilers follow) believes at first he has set Jack the Ripper loose on a socialist utopia; but when he finds that the world is, on the whole, as violent as it's always been, he doesn't use this as an excuse to write off the menace he inflicted on 1979 San Francisco as unimportant, nor does he (or the film) retreat into a "Back to the Future" fairytale. He makes a serious attempt to right his inadvertant wrong. This is the main reason that tension steadily builds throughout and the "chase" conclusion is as smart and involving as anything that has gone before.
An earlier writer regretted that Meyer didn't have his hero travel back in time in an attempt to prevent Jack the Ripper's crimes before they were committed (and even went so far as to blame this "failing" on the absence of CGI!), and I suppose that if I'd been a fan of incoherent cliché, I would have been disappointed, too. But this is a film, thank goodness, that takes itself seriously. There's no nonsense about changing the past. H.G. Wells (some spoilers follow) believes at first he has set Jack the Ripper loose on a socialist utopia; but when he finds that the world is, on the whole, as violent as it's always been, he doesn't use this as an excuse to write off the menace he inflicted on 1979 San Francisco as unimportant, nor does he (or the film) retreat into a "Back to the Future" fairytale. He makes a serious attempt to right his inadvertant wrong. This is the main reason that tension steadily builds throughout and the "chase" conclusion is as smart and involving as anything that has gone before.