Timeline - Thoughtless Sci-Fi

my rating: Nathan's rating:

I should've saved the "Star Trek" references from my review of Master and Commander for this movie. Timeline deserves them more, and I don't mean that in a good way. This film takes bunches of Trek clichés, marries them to clichés of the "rescue" genre, and relies on the occasional killing and the climactic battle scene to keep the audience engaged. It does not provide any intelligent insight into the paradoxes of time travel - or even use them effectively - as I'd hoped from the teasers in the trailer.

The premise is that a top-secret high-tech outfit has discovered a way to send people back in time to 14th-century English-occupied France. (They jogged through the historical context of the expedition pretty quickly. All you need to know is that the French are the good guys and the English are the bad buys. And to make things interesting, two of the characters are Scottish, which was very different from being English in that era.) The group of young archaeologists discover this when they find a 650-year-old hand-written "help me" note from the elder archaeologist and father of one of the youngsters. Apparently he got trapped back there. So of course they mount a rescue mission.

This is the biggest bits of irrationality to the movie. First of all, it's a hasty rescue mission. Well, they half-explain away that part by saying that they don't have control over the specific time they'll arrive, but in that case how do they know they won't arrive before the professor gets trapped there. They expect you to just not think of such things.

Plus there's the inherent irrationality of the rescue itself. One person is in trouble, so they send eight people into danger to get him. We know damn well that not everyone is going to survive. Especially when two of the 8-member expedition are generic soldier types. They might as well have worn Classic Trek security red shirts, and introduced themselves as "Expendable Crewman #1" and "Expendable Crewman #2", because they die before doing anything that might constitute characterisation. OK, we have the benefit of knowing the conventions of the genre, but even the characters must have known that there was a better-than-average chance that someone on the expedition would die, making the "rescue" a wash at best, and probably a net loss. And some of them (not just the two red-shirts) do, making the "happy ending" ring rather hollow to anyone who actually thinks about it. At least Saving Private Ryan questioned whether it was worthwhile to save this one unremarkable person at the risk of several others' lives; this movie just accepts the idea that "extras" and "supporting characters" are inherently less worthy of living than "stars".

Speaking of casualties, our band of time travelers don't seem especially worried about the historical ramifications of killing people during their visit to 1357. They pay some lip service to the Temporal Prime Directive by worrying that their actions will change the outcome of the historical battle they've all studied, but when it's a choice between getting caught by the bad guys, and killing a menacing soldier (who might possibly be an ancestor of William Shakespeare or Winston Churchill or John Lennon or Posh Spice) the only angst they suffer is over having never killed anyone before today.

Perhaps their lack of concern can be explained by the heavy-handed "foreshadowing" which telegraphs how things are going to end up. Like the archaeologist who talks about how he's more interested in the past than the present and marvels over the romance of the tomb of a knight (missing an ear) and his lady, buried together... when he stumbles upon a beautiful young woman and then rescues her, you spend the rest of the movie wondering when his ear gets cut off. Which is to say nothing of the romance between the elder archaeologist's son and the pretty female archaeologist who starts out not being interested in him. Gee, ya think they'll end up together?

There are numerous points where a little common sense - or even just characters behaving like real people, rather than following the motivations needed by the plot - would have saved our heroes a lot of trouble. One of the red-shirts does something Really Stupid which results in the time-travel device being non-functional for several hours. Just like happens to the transporter in every single episode of Star Trek (any series) when the transporter would neatly solve the problem by getting the crew out of whatever jam they're in. But no one thinks to try using the other teleportation unit mentioned earlier in the film.

The movie isn't done entirely by the numbers. There are some surprises along the way. But every twist in the plot is obviously contrived to steer it to its intended outcome. Rather than causes leading to their effects, the effects dictate what their causes must be. The final scene back at the present-day dig reveals the full story behind what happened at this archaeological site. The kids hadn't seen it before they left, and the only real question we're left with is whether they would have bothered sitting through the whole movie if they'd known at the beginning how it would come out. For what it's worth, I did know... and I still stayed. It wasn't painfully bad, just disappointingly thoughtless.