Timeline
Quick - anyone know of a place to get quality acting lessons? Paul Walker is in need indeed!
To be fair, I really don’t like the adaptation of this Michael Crichton book, nor the way that they went about making this film. Watching the “Making Of” a movie (especially on DVD) can really give you some insight to the mood of how a movie was made. Personally, I think that Richard Donner is a decent director. Superman I & II, The Toy, Maverick, The Lethal Weapon Quadrilogy, The Goonies, Conspiracy Theory are all in his credits, and are excellent films. But the way that this movie was approached, and adapted to screen, doesn’t seem like enough care was taken to keep the good parts in the movie.
Take for instance, The Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson and his crack team of screen writers took a book that seemed impossible to adapt to screen, and did a fantastic job bring characters, time periods, lands, creatures and an epic story to life. When watching the special edition DVDs (all 100,000 hours of them) you will notice the extreme care taken from the ground floor up. The screen writing process was not only long, but an ongoing process that allowed them to adapt the screen play as they “went along” after they “saw” the results of their work. In fact, it was said that Dialog was rewritten many times after a scene was shot. This is good film-making when working with an adaptation.
For Jurassic Park, another great adaptation - but only cast a dim shadow on the book - Director Steven Spielberg had Michael Crichton onset very often. Never once did I see him on the set of Timeline, nor was the adaptation of the book to screen even mentioned in the process. Oh wait, once Mr. Donner hinted to the fact that the laboratory scene had been 100 pages in the book, and shortened to 5.
To explain this further, I’ve read Timeline, and it’s a well written book. My Mother had a hard time getting through it because of a lot of technical jargon and the book shifted between time a lot. But that is something expected, when dealing with time-travel - you expect the following to occur.
- Explanation of how they traveled through time
- Lessons learned by time-travel (don’t mess with the past).
And Timeline did exactly that. The 100+ page explanation and dialog of how time-travel was possible, the experiments that they’d done, and the successes that they’ve had to date was a very good setup for the peril that the “travelers” were about to - unknowingly - undergo. I think it was a huge mistake to shorten this scene as much as they did. In the movie, 5 pages is about 2 minutes (or less) of time. It pretty much went like this, once the “travelers” got to the laboratory.
“We’ve got a machine that can send you back to the 14th Century. Your Dad is stuck in the 14th Century. Grab some clothes, a sandwich and some clean socks. Ready? Go.” - Lab rat
Horrible adaptation. If you’ve never read the book you will have the following complaints after watching Timeline.
- Bad character development.
- Huge plot holes.
- Unbelievably Predictable.
- Horrible acting.
- 116 minutes of life - wasted.
If you have read the book, you will have the exact same complaints, with the addition of horrible adaptation of a wonderful book. Sorry Michael, write another.
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