Timeline (2003) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

Richard Donner’s Timeline is an optimistic film that really tries to make an exciting film about a medieval battle between the French and English. It also includes some time travel. Unfortunately, it ends up being relatively vanilla and predictable, which is not something you want from a time travel film.

First Impressions

Based on the trailer, this film has some powerful names associated with it. Adapted from a Michael Crichton story and directed by Richard Donner makes this film seem like a no-brainer in terms of quality. A group of scientists devise a “3D FAX machine” which allows them to send objects to the middle ages, including one of their father’s–who becomes trapped. These cocky young Einsteins travel back to the time of swords, medieval castles, and plague to rescue the trapped man, and perhaps do something more. The action all falls on the Timeline, so let’s get started.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

A man in medieval garb appears in the middle of a road in the New Mexico desert and collapses. At the hospital he is pronounced dead, but the doctors wonder about the weird misaligned blood vessels and his freezing extremities. ITC Head of Security Frank Gordon (Neal McDonough) collects the body. At the ITC-sponsored archeological dig in Castlegard, France, Professor Johnston (Billy Connolly) and Andre Marek (Gerard Butler) tell the story of the battle of La Roque castle to their students, including Kate Ericson (Frances O’Connor), François Dontelle (Rossif Sutherland), Josh Stern (Ethan Embry), and Johnston’s son Chris (Paul Walker).

The Professor tells Chris that he believes that ITC president, Robert Doniger (David Thewlis), knows more about the site than he lets on–continuously urging them to dig in specific places, and is visiting the ITC headquarters to get answers. After the professor’s departure, Kate and Marek investigate a hidden chamber exposed by a cave-in where they find a modern bifocal lens–matching the Professors–plus a note scrawled on a 600 year-old manuscript, signed EA Johnston. ITC sends for the students to visit the New Mexico headquarters after Chris leaves several threatening messages.

ITC vice-president Steven Kramer (Matt Craven) and Doniger meet the young archeologists and explain to them, without much preamble, that ITC discovered a way to transmit matter between two points. Their process, akin to a three-dimensional FAX machine, did not teleport their objects to New York as intended. Instead, they discovered they had opened a wormhole that was locked to 1357 Castlegard, France. Not necessarily time travel, but something close enough. Doniger needs Andre, Chris, Kate, and François to travel through the portal with security chief Gordon plus two soldiers, as they have the necessary information about how to rescue the professor, who has become trapped in 1357.

After arriving in medieval France, a number of English troops attack the students and one of the soldiers is injured. Returning through the device, he drops a modern grenade–which damages the teleportation machine nearly beyond repair. Kramer and Josh, who stayed behind due to not wanting his molecules destroyed and recreated, have less than six hours to make the necessary repairs to get the team home. In Castlegard, the group is captured by the English and François, believed to be a French spy, is executed by Lord Oliver (Michael Sheen). The group is put in an attic with the Professor, which Kate escapes from and frees them.

Escaping the English, the group becomes separated again as Marek helps a French woman who turns out to be Claire (Anna Friel), sister of French leader Lord Arnaut (Lambert Wilson). Gordon and the Professor are captured by an English knight, Sir William De Kere (Marton Csokas), who reveals himself to really be William Decker, an ITC employee who has gone rogue, using his knowledge of history to change the past and enable the English to beat the French. Chris and Kate discover a hidden tunnel in the local monastery that leads into La Roque, just like they hypothesized at the dig.

That evening at the battle of La Roque, Marek helps Claire and Lord Arnaut fight the English, and provide them a way into the castle via the hidden passage. During a sword fight with Decker, Marek loses an ear and realizes that a sarcophagus (whose figure was also missing an ear) they had previously found in the dig site belonged to him. He kills Decker and chooses to stay, marrying Claire. The English are defeated and with only minutes left, the ITC team in the present fix the machine and the Professor, Kate, and Chris are sent home; just as Doniger–who was vocal about giving up on the team–accidentally steps into the machine. The tech leader appears in the midst of a charge of soldiers, getting killed almost immediately. Returning to the dig, the Professor and students find an inscription from Marek on the side of the sarcophagus, revealing Marek’s happy lifetime with Claire and his children.

“We just step on that machine out there and just whiz back to 1357 to get the professor back?” – Andre Marek

History in the Making

Timeline seems like a film that would make a big hit. It was based on sci-fi author Michael Crichton’s 1999 novel of the same name, and comes on the heels of Crichton’s most successful decade of film adaptation, the 90s. Films adapted from his works in the previous decade include Jurassic Park (1993), Rising Sun (1993), Disclosure (1994), Congo (1995), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Sphere (1998), and The 13th Warrior (1999). Unfortunately, this would be the last original story adapted from a Crichton book, with only a remake of The Andromeda Strain released in 2008. Timeline also featured direction by Richard Donner, a creator of some of the best movies for the past three decades, which include The Omen, Superman: The Movie, The Goonies, Scrooged, Maverick, and the Lethal Weapon series. His track record was not immaculate, but was better than average. This film turned out to be his second to last film before his retirement.

With a solid story to work from that featured time travel, and a top-notch director, the film should have been a winner. So why does it seem so mediocre? Elements of the book were altered to shorten and streamline the film. Chris, who is another student in the book, now becomes Professor Johnston’s son in the film. Presumably, this makes the urgency and need to rescue the Professor stronger. Chris is also the one who kills William Decker/de Kere in the book, but the film had Marek take over that plot point. Yet, none of these changes really matter. So what went wrong?

Timeline as a novel does what many of Crichton’s books do: rely on a lot of technical detail and minutiae that point out humans’ tendency to fail in light of scientific advancements. That information is unable to be properly communicated via film, and so some of the more interesting aspects of science and history goes missing. The film also purports to be a time travel film, except it plays down those aspects by explaining too much about the machine and creating something that sounds sillier than it needed to be. There’s also a number of plot contrivances that keep the characters separated throughout the film. The team only has six hours in which to find the Professor and get back home. They find him quickly, but the group becomes separated at least three times over the course of the film, which seems frustrating. There’s also a series of contrived rules that are not exactly clear, which prevent the characters from completely understanding the risks, hence the audience is unclear about them as well.

Genre-fication

Let’s begin by examining time travel films in general to see what makes them work. The most popular sci-fi time travel films feature a character or two traveling somewhere in time. That may be characters coming to the audiences present, such as The Terminator bringing characters from the future to our present, or Time After Time bringing characters from the past to our present. However it works, most films follow the characters as they travel somewhere else. Like, Back to the Future that starts in the present and follows Marty to the past or Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home which starts in our future and follows the Enterprise crew to our present. In all these, the audience is concerned about, and invested with, the characters of the film.

Timeline has a lot of characters that travel through time, but not much is known about any of them, at least no more than is strictly necessary. There’s no real reason to connect to any of them or care if they live or die. We meet the professor for a couple scenes before he disappears. Having his son Chris worry for him is a driving force to get all the characters in a place to travel backwards, but not really make the audience care. Marek is one of the characters that audiences might relate to. He’s apparently capable of taking care of himself in the dangerous times they travel to–as evidenced by the immediate attack by the English which kills the two most trained soldiers. Plus he’s played by Gerard Butler, which makes him a bit more enigmatic. But overall, there’s just a bunch of modern-day characters running around in some old woods or a castle, and not much more.

Timeline also purports to be a time travel film as evidenced in the trailer–even though it does talk about the FAX-like technology. The word “time” is in the film’s title, and audiences are teased with modern-day characters traveling to the medieval times. But the film then proceeds to say it’s not really time travel. It’s more of a teleportation system via a wormhole, so the characters can only go from where they are to one place in France, at one particular time. Boring! Not a great way to spark the imagination of the audience. Time travel films also like to sprinkle easter eggs in the beginning that pay off in the end. Those elements in Timeline are too telegraphed and obvious to make them fun enough for another watching.

Societal Commentary

Timeline pits two of its characters against each other on opposite sides of a philosophical debate. Chris, Professor Johnston’s son, is helping out at the dig, but it’s not something that he really enjoys. “I’m not really all that interested in the past,” he tells Marek. But he’s helping out because he’s enamored with Kate. She’s really into archeology, so Chris hangs around so that he can be closer to her. He actually resents the past. He blames it as the reason his parents split up. That either can be seen as his parents splitting up in his past, or–more accurately–his father’s love of the past broke up the marriage.

Marek on the other other hand loves the past. “It helps us to understand where we came from or where we’re going.” He loves the stories of the people, the honor of the men, and piecing it all back together. He tries to tell Chris the tale of a sarcophagus that they found in the castle ruins of a French knight and his lady. He points out the oddities of the casket such as the missing ear on the knight–which he points out was carved that way. And the fact that the figures are holding hands, which is rare at that time. These stories make Marek wonder what was going on, and how he can learn from what the past has to offer.

Of course the end of the film shows that the looking back was really looking forward all along. The knight, which happens to be Marek who traveled to the past, lost an ear, ended up staying in that time and married Lady Claire. The movie really becomes about Marek living his dream and getting a chance to experience a time that he’s always been enamored with. For Chris, he now gets a chance to have a happy story of the past, as he realizes the connection between the sarcophagus the team found, and his friendship with Marek.

The Science in The Fiction

Timeline is unique in the pantheon of time travel films, for both the methodology and discovery of the technology. Doniger tells the archeologists that they were attempting to transmit an object between the New Mexico office and New York using a pair of machines. It was a device that stripped the item down to the molecular level, transmitted it over the wiring between the two offices, and reconstituted it. Yet it never arrived in New York. After a while it would reappear back in the New Mexico lab. It turns out that ITC somehow tapped into a wormhole that existed between ITC New Mexico and Castlegard, France, 1357 AD. What are the odds, right? Especially when there was no need for a second machine 600 years ago.

They then discovered that they could create small medallions to be worn on their necks that looked like something from the period (nothing modern goes back–it was a very important rule for them). These markers provided a timer, which let the wearer know how long they had to return, as well as a button which allowed them to return. Gordon tells the scientists, “one marker will bring all of you back,” which is a little confusing. When the guard is shot and clicks his marker to return, he ends up being the only one to return. So does it only return people holding hands together with the marker? It seems to be the case, which is fortunate, since all but one marker is lost or damaged by the end of the film. For as much of the technology that is explained, this is another example of things that aren’t delved into which makes audiences realize it doesn’t all make sense.

Josh is the one scientist that refuses to travel back in time. Why? Because he realizes that he would be destroyed and recreated by the machine–a scientific principle that has been debated for decades about the transporters on Star Trek. With that technology, much like the machine here, there’s not actually a travel that occurs. The device encodes the positions and structure of each atom in an object, destroys the atoms, and then reconstitutes it somewhere else. This is why people describe a “momentary” pain when traveling. They’re actually being disintegrated! This is yet another confusing element in Timeline, since a) there’s no device to receive them in 1357, and b) it’s described as a wormhole–which is like a tear in space-time that allows objects to pass from one location to another, or in this case, one time to another. It’s an interesting scientific debate, but another of the elements that makes the film not as good as it could be.

The Final Frontier

Perhaps the filmmakers were hoping to capitalize on Paul Walker’s recent stardom. He had been in some films in the 90s including Pleasantville, Varsity Blues, and She’s All That, but it was his 2001 role in The Fast and The Furious, and sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious just months before Timeline opened that catapulted him into stardom. That explains his top billing. But Gerard Butler was arguably the star of the film. He too had a few roles under his belt including Reign of Fire and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life, but it wouldn’t be until the 2006 film 300 that his career took off. Fans of the film’s featured on Sci-Fi Saturdays might recognize the actress that played Kate, Frances O’Connor, as the mother, Monica, in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which is about as different as two roles in two years could be. The film has a lot of interesting actors and character actors, but enough other inconsistencies that it feels lacking.

If the premise of this film seems at all interesting, I highly recommend checking out Michael Crichton’s novel on which the film was based. It ends up being much more interesting.

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