Timeline (2003)

Director: Richard Donner                                 Writers: Jeff Maguire & George Nolfi
Film Score: Brian Tyler                                   Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel
Starring: Paul Walker, Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly and Frances O’Connor

I don’t mean to disrespect the dead, but the last good novel Michael Crichton wrote was The Andromeda Strain. That’s right, his first. The unfortunate thing about Crichton’s novels are his penchant for hackneyed plots and atrocious dialogue. Yeah, Jurassic Park was popular, but it’s not a good film. Disclosure was about the best film adaptation of his work since The Andromeda Strain, and even that looks dated now because of the computer applications. It’s too bad. Even though his novels were not very well written, that didn’t mean that the films had to be poorly written and directed as well . . . but they were.

Timeline is a perfect example. First of all, the plot is almost a direct rip off of The Final Countdown from 1980. Now that had an interesting plot, and the motivations of the time travelers made sense. In Crichton’s novel a scientific corporation discovers a wormhole in the midst of their experiments in teleportation. Sigh. I'm sorry, but didn’t David Hedison demonstrate the dangers of that in The Fly? Anyway, Billy Connolly, for reasons that never were explained in the film, goes through the wormhole into 1357 France. Paul Walker, Gerard Butler, and several others go back to rescue him, with predictable results. Most of them never come back, Walker gets the girl, Frances O’Connor, and technology saves the day.

It’s difficult not to watch this and think you’re watching a TV movie. The situations are not only predictable but inane, and the dialogue is even worse. Screenwriter Jeff Maguire has written a total of five films and, no surprise here, only one since Timeline. His co-author George Nolfi has a total of seven, but more successful films. Even so, the two of them seem so married to Crichton’s awful dialogue that it drags the whole film down. Of course looking at the films director Richard Donner has directed, it’s not a big surprise either that he was unable to lift the production above it’s pedestrian beginnings. In the end, Timeline is just another bad movie, no more, no less. Certainly not worth expending any more words on.