TIMELINE is the latest of Michael Crichtons novels to be translated to the silver screen. For those unfamiliar with Mr. Crichtons oeuvre, he churns them out like Wisconsin turns out cheese wheels and, as with any mass production concern, quality control sometimes slips between the cracks. Sometimes you get JURASSIC PARK, and sometimes you get SPHERE. What we have here is SPHERE with more action and less fun. And if youve seen or read SPHERE, you know exactly what that means.
The premise here is time travel. The villain is a nerdy tech wiz (David Thewliss) who started out trying to send objects through space with something like a transporter from STAR TREK, and ended up opening a whole other can of worms. To be precise, hes opened a wormhole that takes him through space, to France, and to another time, the 14th century. And of all the places in the 14th century a wormhole could have gone to, this one chose a small town, Castleguard, thats about to be destroyed along with its backwater castle by the ravages of the Hundred Years War. Okay, to be fair, not even Paris would have been all that exciting at that particular moment in time, what with it being little more than a jumped-up village with a really big cathedral in the middle of it, but still, theres an opportunity wasted.
The heroes are a band of archeologists who are excavating Castleguard in the present, funded by the nerdy wiz in an effort to find out what it was that attracted the wormhole. Not that our intrepid band of diggers knows anything about that. Not yet. But as such things go in films such as these, they soon discover an anachronism in the form of a bifocal lens that just happens to be the exact prescription belonging to Professor Edward Johntson (Billy Connolly), the expedition leader. And they discover it along with a note written by him in 1357 right after he leaves to visit the nerdy wiz and find out why said wiz knows so much about the site. From there its a trip back, to nerd central with the professors anti-archeologist son, Chris (Paul Walker), a great deal of expository dialogue and a further trip back in time to rescue Johnston, fight the English, save the French and develop a preposterous romance or two.
Crichton knows how to generate a story. The key is to have something happen every five minutes or so, even if its not terribly interesting, even if it doesnt advance the plot very much. The score will boldly sound those pounding, urgent notes to let us know we are supposed to be on the edge of out seats. Hence, we get the inevitable systems failure to lend an air of urgency to the concurrent story in the present as the mad scientists try to fix their invention and bring our gang back home. Further hence we have things like the plucky gal archeologist, Kate (Frances OConner), claw her way through a thatched roof to escape the English, Christopher, the plucky son race madly across meadows, also to escape the English, Andre (Gerard Butler) the plucky archeologist with a romantic streak for all things past, swim down a river with a damsel in distress in tow, both escaping the English, and Johnston mutters a great deal about whats going on while he doesnt quite escape the British who take him captive and lead him off tied to the back of a cart. Actually, everyone mutters in this film, mutters, chatters, yelps, yadda, yadda, yadda, on and on and on even in the heat of battle, stating the obvious and then stating it again. Its as though the filmmakers are afraid that if the screen falls still and/or silent for even a second, we will all irrevocably lose interest. Its a plan that fails in the face of plodding direction by Richard Donner and lackluster performances by all concerned. Throw in inconsistencies in every time line, a 14th century population that speaks contemporary French and English with not so much as a zounds or gadzooks for relief, and a time machine that looks like a mirrored whirl-a-gig constructed by the lowest bidder, and you have a snore of a film whose sole positive accomplishment is teaching us a new word, trebuchet, and showing us what that war machine was capable of doing with flaming ammunition.
The only really clever thing in TIMELINE is casting Thewlis as the nerdy tech wiz. He bears what may well be a deliberate resemblance to Bill Gates, a nerdy tech wiz who probably could figure out time travel if he felt like it, but wouldnt make a mess of it the way the producers if TIMELINE did of their film.
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