Rating: 
Summary: Zero artistic effort here
Review: What a lazy, sophomoric effort by Richard Donner. I read Timeline a few years ago and I recall enjoying it. It wasn't great literature, but it was fast and fun and I looked forward to the film version. I regret to report that I honestly can't think of one single redeeming feature in this sorry excuse of a film. A script that butchers the book, which is amazing in itself. Crichton practically writes his novels for the screen these days. Uninspired directing. In the past Donner has given us some fine work like Ladyhawk and Lethal Weapon. It was painfully obvious that the person who made this turd just did not care if it was good or not. The cast was barely adequate, with only Gerard Butler making any kind of impression. The action scenes were cable TV quality, as were the sets and costumes. How bad was this movie? Congo (another Crichton novel that was mugged by the filmakers), by comparison, was a good movie. Zero artistic effort here. Sub-zero, if there is such a thing.
Rating: 
Summary: Could have been better
Review: Abraham doesnt sound like too intelligent of a reviewer so I will try and make sense of it.The movie is entertaining, if LOOSELY based off the incredible book by Michael Crichton. (Abraham, i suggest you read the book before blathering off about something you know nothing about) There are plot holes, bad acting, and less than stellar wardrobes. But if you have read the book, it is still entertaining to see the characters on screen and see the story in action.
Rating:
Summary: Predictable
Review: It's a familiar story for SF readers, though maybe less so for movie watchers: Our Hero[es] go back in time and muck up some linchpin historical event. History knows where it's going, and makes sure things turn out the way they did anyway. For movie purposes, the good guys (or most of them) win and the bad guy suffers the fate he had planned for them.
The nominal story is that The Professor - Uncle Monty from Lemony Snicket - is an archaeologist, and has hooked up with The Corporation. The time travel thingy can only contact one place and time, oddly enough, the site of his research dig back when it was still current events. (Why is is that time machines can only go to interesting places?) The Prof gets stuck way back when, and The Corp convinces his students to go back after him. The Corp omits a few details, like people occasionally coming back in pieces, and sends them back to collect The Prof. That, of course, is where the fun starts.
The rest of the movie is all running around in itchy clothes, trying to hide from both the English and the French as the coming battle looms, and seeing what their archaeological ruins looked like before they were ruined. A technical malfunction (a hand grenade in the time machine) gums things up a bit, but we needed some reason to prolong the voyage. The female characters are good, certainly not the "save me" sort. The male characters are somewhat standard, including a father and son reconciliation in the offing and a few auxiliaries with short life expectancies. In other words, nothing to strain the intellect.
This is acceptable amusement, with lots of great flaming stuff in the medieval night battle. It's only ordinary, but ordinary isn't all that bad.
//wiredweird
Rating: 
Summary: Buy the book!
Review: Very bad screen adaption of a book!!
The book kept the reader riveted and enthralled. This movie just has some fun explosions and battle scenes but gets completely lost during the one and a half hours on the screen.
I won't even discuss this movie in detail, it's not worth it. If you want sincere enjoyment, buy the book online. A new copy from an Amazon affiliate bookseller starts at $1.59 (not a bad investment).
Pity though, the book was fantastic...
Rating:
Summary: I'm sorry I have to say this movie was poor.
Review: Ok, I'll mention the few brief moments I actually enjoyed from this movie. The time travel scenes were decent, but still boring. There just wasn't enough energy in the movie, I just can't escape that. Maybe it seemed like everyone was moving along at a half-hearted pace.
Ok, I have to say a good part, um...ok, when they fired that trebuchent (spelling, who knows), and it was a pretty neat visual of the first flaming fireball. Then they fired back that "magical" greek fire arrow. The commander guy goes "Oh my god," and there's an ok scene of the catapult bursting into flames, and then he says "you are a magician!" That was neato for about 1 minute and 3 seconds. Then back to the same boring slow moving uninspired plodding story line. Who cares if they get back, I was yawning.
They made one last decent philosophical point at the very end about how one makes his own destiny in history. The message at first is impressive, but then it gets worse every moment you think about it. Hmm, time travel back to the past, die of some horrible condition only found in the 1300's (whatever the date).
I'll bet that guy would've been there for like 1 year, and then died of some black plague or something. I want to cry how unrealistic it is. From having his ear chopped off itself would've probably killed him from infection, oh but it is all worth it for the lovely Mary Ann or whoever that was. What about excessive bleeding? Um, nah that doesn't happen in real life. I hope the sex was good for the total of 2 days before he got beheaded for being a heretic.
Heartfelt until you remember the real world, and then you realize that everyone still walked around half-heartedly in the movie, but they wore such neat costumes!! Stick to highlander, get the hell away from this retarded movie. It was entertaining for about 5% of the time.
Maybe reading the book, I read it is based on, will erase this from my memory. I hope a wormhole forms and I can stop this movie from being produced so poorly.
Rating:
Summary: Undemanding and uninspiring time-travel yarn
Review: OK, so I've spent a worse 2 hours than watching Timeline, but I must still confess to feeling curiously empty and unsatisfied.
Not having read the Crichton novel, I had no particular preconceptions about the movie and, being a sucker for the time travel motif, was looking forward to some thought-provoking, visionary and moving sci-fi.
Instead, I got a very lightweight story, peppered with irritating anachronisms, such as the inhabitents of 14th century France speaking perfectly understandable modern French and/or English.
The now routine Hollywood anglophobia started to bug me after a while (anyone with an English accent is a callous butcher) and, it has to be said, Billy Connoly CANNOT ACT. He hammed it up no end in The Last Samurai, and he does so here again. There also seemed to be some serious continuity issues with his ever-changing beard-length!
Anna Friel's music-hall comic French accent fails to convince, and the Canadian landscape simply doesn't look French.
Worst of all though, is the sheer lack of WONDER generated by the time-travel sequences. Maybe this is faithful to the book, in that the main characters have no time to explore and find themselves fighting for their lives as soon as they reach medieval France, but it all felt rather uninspiring to me.
On the plus side, the battle sequences were competently executed, the trebuchet siege machines being genuinely impressive. I am not convinced that 20th century archaeology students would have mastered the lost art of broadsword fighting within 48 hours though!
To summarise; I've seen worse movies - but not that many.
Rating:
Summary: 3.5 almost 4 stars and yes I read the book.
Review: I read the book before I knew they were making a film of this.
Now I do not read MC, in fact this was my first book by him I've read and it was good. I try never to read the book before the movie that way I usually enjoy both.
This movie is quite fun, it is well paced and for the most part I really liked everyone in it. I was a bit disapointed by Frances O'Conner she was a bit too girly but it was not too bad.
What I was most disapointed in was that I think it went too fast. Everything wrapped up just too quickly and the relationship between Merek and Claire just was sudden unlike in the book where they gradually grew to care for each other. The subplot of the abandoned traveller from the company that had made the machine was not at all developed as well as it should have been certainly not as menacing or as creepy as he was in the book. But becuase they changed the "timeline" (pun intended) from several days to only a few hours it all felt far too rushed and sometimes highly unlikely.
However unlike one reviewer who seemed to think the battle sequences badly contrived the battles/fights were actually extremely well done with acurate armor, fighting and real life work siege weapons. My BF is a total history nut about this stuff and was really impressed and happy with all the costumes and battle sequences.
But the cast was quite good and the film is still enjoyable. The extras are not a lot but are fun....the behind the scenes stuff being the best. Gerard Butler is such a clown and made us laugh with his goofing around behind R. Donners back in one sequence!
Rating:
Summary: Not as bad as some would claim
Review: It looks, from other "reviews", that only astrophysicists have been watching this movie and picking apart something that isn't even possible yet at the level of technology the human race is capable of.
Michael Crichton is the Master of Future Probability. He takes an intriguing idea and makes his best guess at how to solve it. Is the solution perfect? Of course not, because if it was, it would be Science Fact not Science Fiction.
Having said all of that, Timeline can be entertaining if you don't watch it only to pick it apart. Paul Walker is no classically trained actor but his job is to portray a young man who doesn't seem to have a focus in life except to visit Dad and try to charm a woman who is way beyond his capabilites. This he does. Gerry Butler should have been considered the "hero"; he is the archeologist and expert in the time period, and he is incredibly handsome, beyond the boyish looks of Walker.
The movie is not Oscar material, but it can be entertaining, as long as you don't mind the historical inaccuracies of the weaponry used by the French and English during The Hundred Years War.
Watch it and judge for yourself. Don't rely on the opinion of others. Thank you.
Rating:
Summary: This and a bowl of haggis won't even buy a cup of coffee-
Review: The only reason I gave this limburger cheese of a film 2 stars was that you DID get to see Gerard Butler without his shirt on. I assume that is the only reason anybody would rent this film. He would have to pull a "full monty", though, to earn any more stars for this clunker, in which case I for one would happily rate it 5 stars and wear out the rewind button.
You can't blame the actors for bad script, bad plotting and bad directing. The final "surprise" at the end was telegraphed so that even a child could see it coming, which mine did. Paul Walker wasn't any worse an actor than the guy who played Dr. Lupin in Harry Potter -you could see HIS fate coming a mile away also. Walker's look was too "surfer dude" for the film, but in the end you felt sorry for ALL the actors involved. Donner ought to be spanked, but then again, maybe not, as it might give him ideas for even more dreadful movies.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining
Review: The movie is very different from the book. However, I'm fascinated by the concept of time travel (which the book stressed this wasn't, but for simplicity's sake...). I liked that no matter what the main characters did which might screw up history as they knew it, everything worked out the way it was supposed to. A certain sense of destiny and fate.
It's an action movie. Take it for what it is and enjoy it. Plus, Gerard Butler and Paul Walker aren't hard to look at... :)
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