Release Date: November 26, 2003
Starring: Paul Walker, Frances O'Connor, Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly, Ethan Embry, Anna Friel, David Thewlis
Directed by: Richard Donner
Written by: Jeff Maguire, George Nolfi
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (intense battle sequences, brief language)
Movies based on Michael Crichton novels illustrate the vast difference between a good storyteller and a bad one. Crichton, the talented, bestselling author of entertaining sci-fi novels like Jurassic Park, Congo, Sphere, and Timeline, has seen his tales get mangled, unfailingly, by screenwriters and directors who look as if they're groping around in the dark by comparison.
Timeline may be the worst one yet (though Congo gives it a run for its money), having finally made it to theaters four years after publication due to a variety of production troubles and, one assumes, the sickening realization at Paramount that this was going to be another Crichton dud. But such a high-profile project does not easily go away, and the distributor has done its best to repackage what was a very compelling tale as a simplistic action-adventure story for teenagers.
As the title suggests, the story is about that old sci-fi standby, time travel. In the book, Crichton developed it in his patented pseudo-scientific manner, blending real-life technology with a bit of creative license. Sort of like the way he made it seem credible that scientists might be able to extract DNA from prehistoric mosquitoes petrified in amber to create a theme park filled with dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. But screenwriters Jeff Maguire and George Nolfi aren't having any of it: in a scene that was critical to the plot of the novel -- when the time-travel technology was explained -- a character cuts everything short in the movie: "I don't care about the hows or the whys," he says.
Right, then. Let's just do it. The basic shell of the plot is the same: a history professor and archaeologist, Edward Johnston (Billy Connolly), whose excavations in France are funded by a New Mexico research corporation called ITC, goes back in time to the 14th century using ITC's time-travel technology. But he gets into trouble there, so he leaves a note calling for help in the very castle whose ruins his students are excavating 650 years later.
Upon discovering the note, his students, which include his son Chris (Paul Walker), another archaeologist named Kate (Frances O'Connor), and a cultural specialist, Andre Marek (Gerard Butler), also go back in time to try to rescue him. None of these actors are particularly well equipped to handle the roles they're given, and they seem almost frustrated at the flat characters they're forced to portray.
By the way, whichever studio executive first saw talent in Walker must surely now be regretting it with every film the actor makes, because he is not simply a bad actor, he is an abominable one. Walker delivers his lines with a California surfer dude's frustrating indifference, and you know that at some point in his life he must have been drummed out of every drama club he ever belonged to. He is ostensibly cast here, as he was in every movie he's been in, for his sex appeal, but what casting directors apparently do not realize is that a Hollywood star must at least pretend, however vaguely, to exude depth and dimension. A redwood forest has more personality than Walker.
In any case, Johnston's students only have six hours before they must return to the present, or else they'll be stuck in the past forever -- and as they soon discover, it's only too easy to get into trouble in a time period none of them really understands. Fourteenth century France was, of course, torn apart by the Hundred Years' War, which means that most of the movie's scenes in that time period involve Braveheart-style battles filmed with generic but competent vigor by veteran action director Richard Donner (he directed all four Lethal Weapon movies).
In the novel, the period scenes were used to illustrate Crichton's other great theme, the one that made it an interesting read and the one for which the author probably wrote the book in the first place: the characters from the 21st century were entering a world that was vastly different and exponentially more dangerous than their own, one in which all of their cutting-edge knowledge was more or less entirely useless.
The movie adopts the point of view that anyone from the present would be able to outsmart anyone from the past, but in truth this is probably wildly inaccurate. For one, most people today take the great miracles of science that make the world run entirely for granted: If you were transported back to the 14th century, could you explain how an internal-combustion engine works, or tell someone how to build a printing press? Could you name the stars in the sky or perform open-heart surgery? Probably not, which leads one to believe that the archaeology students in Timeline -- tall, thin, good-looking, and impossibly ignorant individuals that they are -- would be crushed like ants under the heels of the thuggish musclebound medieval warriors they encounter.
Not coincidentally, this entire theme has been greatly minimized in the much blander movie version, and everything the book addressed the movie does not. All of this might thus seem like one long digression, but I mention it to point out that if you see this film and deservingly level your scorn in its direction, don't write it off to another stupid Hollywood idea for a blockbuster actioner. At least not entirely. Rather, blame it on the producer or executive who assumed audiences too flighty to be interested in a more substantial, realistic tale of time-travel adventure.
-- Craig Roush (crr225@nyu.edu)