rofessor Johnston (Billy Connolly) wants his wayward son, Chris (Walker), to join him in the family business: archaeology. But Chris is visiting the professor's dig at the ruins of a medieval fortress in Dordogne, France, for one reason: to hook up with the prof's comely graduate student, Kate (O'Connor). The professor's favorite, Kate will have none of it. Chris isn't serious, and she is.
Professor Johnston has to travel back to the United States to consult with the dig's benefactors, the mysterious ITC Corp., headed by the snaky Robert Doniger (David Thewlis). Back in France, Kate, Chris and the professor's colleague, Andre Marek (Butler), make a startling discovery. Inside a tunnel that's been sealed for six centuries, they find a bifocal eyeglass lens and a scrawled note: "Help me. E. Johnston." It's the professor's handwriting, and the lens is a piece of the eyeglasses he was wearing when he said goodbye to Chris that morning.
Suddenly called back to ITC, the students learn the truth. ITC, which has been trying to develop a three-dimensional "fax machine" to transport solid objects, has instead inadvertently opened a wormhole to the past. Specifically, to the 14th century and to the very castle where the students have been digging. And the professor, who traveled back to the Middle Ages, has become trapped and lost. It's up to Chris, Kate, Marek and a team of commandos to go get him.
With no time to think, the students learn that they'll have only six hours before they are irretrievably trapped in the past themselves.
When they travel, painfully, back to the Middle Ages, they find themselves set upon by the English knights of Lord Oliver (Michael Sheen), who has been battling the French Lord Arnaut (Lambert Wilson) as part of the Hundred Years War. One of the group's team is killed. Then a disaster back in the future disables the time device. And the medieval clock is ticking.
A movie more Sphere than Jurassic Park
There are two kinds of Michael Crichton movie adaptations: the Andromeda Strain kind, and the Sphere kind. Timeline strains, but it's no Strain.
Part of the appeal of the original Timeline novel was its mixing of cutting-edge scientific mumbo-jumbo about parallel universes and its scrupulously detailed evocation of the Middle Ages, right down to the use of Middle English and Occitan (a medieval French dialect). Crichton's depiction of a historically accurate medieval world served as a bracing antidote to dozens of wildly off-the-mark Hollywood versions of knights and castles.
So what do the filmmakers do with this? On the one hand, they strip away most of the science. On the other hand, they take Crichton's medieval world and simply morph it back into the very Hollywood cliche that Crichton was trying to undermine.
The result is a very generic action movie with sword-and-armor sequences that recall Martin Lawrence's Black Knight. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was more credible.
The characters, all interchangeably bland, spend a lot of time running and hiding from guys on horses with swords, and that's about it. Donner, who made a lot out of his decision to eschew computer effects, spends way too much camera time on his "trebuchets," actual working catapults. And the village and castle environs look about as authentic as Fantasyland at Disney World.
Donner and his writers also make some curious character choices that smooth off rough edges and rob our heroes of much of their heroism. In particular, the book's stalwart knight wannabe Marek is transformed into a pansy professor, even though he's played by the manly Butler.
