TIMELINE follows in the footsteps of THE LOST WORLD and CONGO as being a dumbed-down version of a Michael Crighton novel.In the book the fascinating thing is how the time-travel process is explained. In the movie it's referred to as a 'wormhole', which is fixed to a certain spot in time. I guess if you're a STAR TREK fan or something, you readily accept this explaination.The female character in the book has balls-she's tough. Here, nothing special. And there are way too many characters to adequately deal with, as in the new DAWN OF THE DEAD remake. It's also never explained why the group is in such a tizzy to recover one scientist who hasn't come back from the past. To get him back they send eight people-and in the end only three of them return to the present. It's silly. My biggest complaint, however, is that the middle ages is too clean-looking (it was filthy back then) and the present-day characters can understand their language. In the book they had to learn old English. It would be like trying to understand someone reading SHAKESPEARE without ever having read him before. The language was very very different.The movie is also something that the book is not-it is boring. There are much better time-travel movies out there.
TIMELINE follows in the footsteps of THE LOST WORLD and CONGO as being a dumbed-down version of a Michael Crighton novel.In the book the fascinating thing is how the time-travel process is explained. In the movie it's referred to as a 'wormhole', which is fixed to a certain spot in time. I guess if you're a STAR TREK fan or something, you readily accept this explaination.The female character in the book has balls-she's tough. Here, nothing special. And there are way too many characters to adequately deal with, as in the new DAWN OF THE DEAD remake. It's also never explained why the group is in such a tizzy to recover one scientist who hasn't come back from the past. To get him back they send eight people-and in the end only three of them return to the present. It's silly. My biggest complaint, however, is that the middle ages is too clean-looking (it was filthy back then) and the present-day characters can understand their language. In the book they had to learn old English. It would be like trying to understand someone reading SHAKESPEARE without ever having read him before. The language was very very different.The movie is also something that the book is not-it is boring. There are much better time-travel movies out there.
