Nathan Edward Williams

Let me say first that I liked this movie. I really enjoyed it as the popcorn-flick it was intended to be. I know that people whine about how it didn't stay true to the book and all, but I've found that except for The Lord of the Rings (and maybe Harry Potter), being overly religious to the source text is usually a bad thing.

My main beef with this movie was the fact that the Eloi speak English 800,000 years in the future. They call it the "Lex" for no apparent reason or the "Stone Language" for a more apparent reason, and say that they not only learned English from English words carved in stone, but that they teach it to their children so that our hero can be understood, I mean so that they can pay respect to their ancestors.

This is just asinine. We have walls carved by the Egyptians literally covered in Hieroglyphics, and we didn't have a clue what any of it said until we found the Rosetta stone. We still have no way of knowing how any of it was pronounced, just what different combinations of symbols mean. And they want me to believe that by collecting stones that say "Brooklyn Bridge," and "New York Public Library" that they not only figured out how to speak English, but that they speak it with only a minor accent? How's that work exactly?

And to add insult to injury, there was a perfectly logical solution to this conundrum that already existed in the script! The character of VOX Systems, played superbly by Orlando Jones, was a character that spoke not only English, but every language known to man at the time the moon "fell from the sky." He also survived 800,000 years to meet Alexander in the future. Why not, I don't know, just rewrite the script to say that the Eloi found VOX, and that he taught them English? Would that not make perfect sense, and clear up the biggest leap of logic in the story, one that wasn't even addressed (I've been told) in the original book?