It''s a race against time in
Timeline, the new action film based on the bestselling novel by Michael Crichton. The
book is one of my all time favorites, which means that I had pretty high expectations going into this film... despite the fact that the starring role was given to Paul Walker.
Walker stars as Chris, the son of an archeologist, Edward Johnston (Billy Connolly), who is working on some castle ruins in northern France. When some of his students (Gerard Butler and Frances O''Connor) discover what appears to be his handwriting written in 600-year old ink and one of his lenses in a previously undisturbed part of the castle, they are hurtled into adventure that involves time travel, 14th century France and lots of nasty knights. The realities of time travel are an afterthought as the rest of the movie promises to be exciting from beginning to end.
Richard Donner, best known for his Lethal Weapon movies, directs, and does a pretty good job of creating excitement. From the minute that everyone is sent back to medieval times, Timeline becomes an action-packed film that increases in suspense as the it goes along. Like any book adaptation, the movie does lose some of the juice that made the book so good (more of that later), but Timeline is still fairly entertaining. The only real problems lie in the beginning, where Donner really fails to setup the story and characters properly. From the opening scene to the moment where everyone goes back in time, everything is so rushed that it is hard to get into the story. A pointless romance is pointed out between Walker and O''Conner (even though they do not even slightly match), and the time travel theory is presented a good two minutes before the scientists actually send them back.