TIME BANDITS (1981)
3 out of ****
Starring Craig Warnock, David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, David Warner,
Ralph Richardson;
Directed by Terry Gilliam;
Written by Gilliam & Michael Palin;
Cinematography by Peter Biziou
TIME BANDITS is the first film in Terry Gilliam's "trilogy" about childhood, adulthood, and old age. It is a fantasy, and like the two later films, it is also about fantasy--it explores the relationship between reality and dreams, illusion, escapism. While BRAZIL chillingly showed the failure of imagination, and THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN its triumph, TIME BANDITS is more ambiguous: both the fantastic and the mundane in some way disappoint the story's hero.
TIME BANDITS shares the pessimism of the other two films: reality is not much fun, and that is why we need fantasies. Kevin (Craig Warnock), an adolescent boy, lives a stultifying life with his parents, who are obsessed with technology and routine, and spend their evenings watching awful TV shows. His room, wallpapered with posters, littered with toys, is his place of escape--literally so, when a troupe of time-travelling dwarves stumble out of his closet one night and whisk him away on a series of temporal adventures.
They visit the siege of Castileone, Sherwood Forest, the Titanic, Mycenae, and the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, all with the aid of a map they have stolen from the Supreme Being, showing the location of various "timeholes." The dwarves were in fact formerly in the employ of the Supreme Being--they helped build the world, although because it was done in only seven days, it's a "botched job"--and were given the map so they could repair various oversights in the construction of reality. Fed up with their servitude, they chose instead to wander the ages and steal from the rich (giving to the poor is not part of the plan, however, until they meet Robin Hood, drolly played by John Cleese).
Naturally, this plot offers plentiful opportunites for Gilliam's fertile imagination to run wild, and there are some delightful sequences: the band's arrival in Castileone is marvellously staged, as is their escape from a cage hanging over a pit of ultimate darkness. This is, in effect, the first recognisable Terry Gilliam movie (the feeble JABBERWOCKY was presumably directed by his evil twin), and while he is not yet in complete command of the medium, the signs of his later accomplishments are evident. The problems with TIME BANDITS--and there are many--are on the level of the script.
While the humour is probably fine for kids, the jokes in TIME BANDITS are mostly poor by adult standards, even the ones thrown in specifically for a mature audience. Gilliam demonstrates a gift for both satire and whimsy in his later films, but comedy is not his strong point; even with Michael Palin as co-writer, the script never approaches the manic comic brilliance of "Monty Python's Flying Circus." And the episodic plot suffers from its arbitrariness: the various sequences, while each effective on its own, do not add up to much because there is no dramatic impetus. With minimal tinkering, the plot could be re-written so that the episodes occur in any order.
The finale, however, rescues the movie. It is no surprise that it builds to a climactic sequence in the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, a showdown with the Evil Genius (Satan) created by the Supreme Being (God). The outcome, however, is surprising: in its own way it is as disturbing as the ending of BRAZIL. This is not a happy, feel-good kids' movie. There is whimsy, there is silliness, but the underlying tone is grave, and the movie's examination of free will and the relationship between good and evil is quite sobering, particularly for adults.
Gilliam does not cop to a cheap explanation of the events in TIME BANDITS--it is not all just a dream--nor does he allow us any comfort from those events. What Kevin experiences is, for him, real, and because reality is not much fun, the escapism offered by the dwarves and their map proves to be much less fun than he expected. In this movie, fantasy offers lessons that are, if anything, harsher than the lessons of real life. That, however, is an adult perspective; younger viewers will probably remember the giant who wears a ship as a hat, Napoleon's appreciation for Punch and Judy shows, and an ogre named Winston. After all, one of the points TIME BANDITS makes is that fantasies are more than adequate--until you start to grow up.
Review by David Dalgleish (subjective.freeservers.com) -- January 16th, 2000
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