Timeline

A new adaptation of the Michael Crichton book called Timeline is set to open Thanksgiving week, 2003. While I haven't seen the movie yet, I have read the book: and it looks like it's going to be a hoot.

Timeline is the story of a new-economy mad physicist/businessman named Doniger--the book was published in 1999, when the new economy was still steamrolling everything in its path. Doniger (and hooray! the part's being played by the amazing actor David Thewlis), it seems, has taken it into his head to buy up several pristine archaeological sites in the world, spend horrendous amounts of money to get them thoroughly excavated by the top archaeologists available, and then donate the sites back to the governments that originally owned them. I won't tell you why he's doing this; although anybody with an ounce of cultural resource management background in them can recognize it, it's one of those things that Crichton saves until the end. It's safe to say it isn't altruism. At any rate, most of the action takes place at one site in the Dordogne Valley of France, a medieval (14th century AD) castle complex called Castelgard.

Castelgard is being excavated by the famous archaeologist Edward Johnston (played in the movie by actor/comedian Billy Connolly) and a handful of his graduate students. Johnston is called back to the states to have a chat with Doniger, and after he is gone, the students discover incontrovertible evidence that poor old Johnston has actually traveled through time to the 14th century and now needs rescuing. Doniger, it seems, has discovered a way to transport (well, fax, more or less) people across time, and he now needs the four students to go and bring back their hapless mentor. The hero is one of the students (apparently in the movie it's Johnston's son), and he is played by Paul Walker from the Fast and Furious movies.

As always in a Crichton book (the books I've read anyway), the science and implications of the ideas in the book are fully realized. Of course, also usually true for Crichton's books--certainly this one--is that the science comes at the expense of character development. Ah, well, who needs real characters? The plot is fun and watching medieval scholars discover what it takes to wield medieval broadswords is quite something.

A great plot, an archaeofiction that doesn't make archaeologists look like dolts, and David Thewlis as the bad guy. Whew! Hey, save me some popcorn!