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 ‘Timeline’ wastes time A Review By Glen Osterberger I wanted to like this film. I really did. Growing up as a sci-fi nut I always thought of traveling back into the past or somehow being transported to another world. “Timeline” seemed like a decent vehicle to fulfill my childhood fancy. Richard Donner (“Ladyhawke,” “Lethal Weapon,” “Superman”) directed the film based on Michael Crichton’s 1999 book by the same name. This is the first time Donner and Crichton (“Jurassic Park,” “The Great Train Robbery,” “The Andromeda Strain”) have collaborated, but they have had some duds like “Assassins” and “Congo” respectively with others. Even those were pretty enjoyable in an escapist way. “Timeline” is like those: enjoyable as long as you don’t take it too seriously. Crichton’s premise has a research company and its Bill Gates-like CEO (David Thewlis) attempting to create a viable transporter system intended for instantaneous package delivery. Instead of shifting things in space they accidentally stumble upon a “wormhole in time” that, for no reason that is ever explained, leads to one particular village in 14th-century France. This is where our heroes, a group of a group of archaeology students working at the modern site of the ancient village, come in. Of course, the dig site is funded by the evil corporation so that they can get more information on the site and why everything seems to be going to that one place in time. The head archaeologist (Billy Connolly) is disturbed by the oddly accurate suggestions coming from the corporation. Determined to get to the bottom of the corporation’s unusual interest in this dig, the professor jets off to headquarters. He isn’t heard from again (there is a bad bit of editing that doesn’t show time passing) until the students find a note from the professor dated 1357. In order to get to the bottom of things the students and the professor’s son Chris (Paul Walker) head off to the corporation’s headquarters and then go back in time to save him. Normally the Crichton stories have just enough science to sound sort of plausible but this one seems to toss most of it out the window in an attempt to push the story along. While back in the past ,they have all sorts of grand adventures in the six-hour time limit that is allotted to them. I was glad to see that they suddenly didn’t learn sword skills but had to get along with even more primitive weapons and sneakiness. The historic stuff was done well enough and looked interesting but the story was lackluster. Maybe the original Crichton story wasn’t that great but perhaps the subtleties got lost in the translation by screenplay writers George Nolfi and Jeff Maguire. At first I enjoyed the foreshadowing that was used throughout the film but then I realized that they were feeding you every bit of information instead of being a true thriller and letting you find out things on your own. Sadly, the spoon-feeding, generally lackluster performances, clichés and moments of illogic turn what could have been a fun scientific thriller into a B-movie time-travel film. |
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