RE:View Time Bandits
“Removing his helmet reveals himself to be none other than Sean Connery or an actor of equal but cheaper stature.”
This joke, made on a golf course is more or less how got Time Bandits got greenlit. The Joke was made to Sean Connery himself, and he liked it. It was the start of trend for him during the eighties. Highlander, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and a few others.
Time Bandits is the most inexplicable kids’ film of all time. Possibly the most inexplicable part was how it got made in the first place.
I have to start with Terry Gilliam.
“I became terrified that I was going to be a full-time, bomb-throwing terrorist if I stayed [in the US] because it was the beginning of really bad times in America. It was ’66–’67, it was the first police riot in Los Angeles. … In college my major was political science, so my brain worked that way. … And I drove around this little English Hillman Minx top down—and every night I’d be hauled over by the cops. Up against the wall, and all this stuff. They had this monologue with me; it was never a dialogue. It was that I was a long-haired drug addict living off some rich guy’s foolish daughter. And I said, “No, I work in advertising. I make twice as much as you do.” Which is a stupid thing to say to a cop. … And it was like an epiphany. I suddenly felt what it was like to be a black or Mexican kid living in L.A. Before that, I thought I knew what the world was like, I thought I knew what poor people were, and then suddenly it all changed because of that simple thing of being brutalized by cops. And I got more and more angry and I just felt, I’ve got to get out of here—I’m a better cartoonist than I am a bomb maker. That’s why so much of the US is still standing.”
I have no idea if even a word of this is true. However, Gilliam did arrive in Britain in 1967 and started work as an animator on a kid’s show called, Do Not Adjust Your Set, it featured Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Eric Idle. Across the hall was a more adult sketch show called, At Last the 1948 Show starring among others John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Both of these show were in black and white. There were some pre-existing relationships between some of these men going back as far back as university. In 1969 they all got together for a new color sketch show for the BBC called Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Which I am not going into today.
Cult classic doesn’t even begin to cover the legs Monty Python has had.
Terry Gilliam did most of his work behind the camera. Mostly writing and directing. After Holy Grail (1975) and Life of Brian (1979) the Pythons didn’t exactly break up, they just needed some time apart after ten years together.
They did frequently make appearances in each other’s projects. Gilliam had started work on Brazil, although he was faced with the problem of pitching a story that no one could understand or what the hell he was trying to do with his story.
Former Beatle George Harrison and his partner Denis O’Brien had formed the company Hand Made Films to shoot the very controversial Life of Brian. It made $20 million against a budget of $5 million and back in the seventies this was considered very successful.
Gilliam put his big dream on a back burner and sat down with Michael Palin to write what started life as Monty Python’s only kid’s film. It didn’t quite become that but after Connery’s commitment the funding opened up. Cleese, and Palin were able to commit to cameo roles but the rest of the troup either didn’t have the time or just didn’t want to, depending.
Gilliam and Palin had been quietly encouraged to put religious overtones on a backburner after the controversy surrounding Life of Brian. Which they kind of did. Sort of. To a degree anyway.
Time Bandits is meant to be a boy’s adventure so Gilliam kept the camera angles low wherever possible. He also chose to surround Kevin with dwarves to help maintain this point of view.
The story is simple, a boy in dull middle class household, dreams of a life of adventure in different times of history. And then he goes on these adventures.
Kevin’s parents during their brief appearance at the beginning are entirely concerned with materialism. They want the newest home appliances and keep their furniture under plastic wrap (which believe it or not really was a thing back then). Kevin goes to bed and a mounted knight in armor bursts out of closet and then rides out through his bedroom wall. Kevin knows his parents won’t believe him so the next night he makes preparations, stealing the family’s Polaroid Instamatic and taking a flashlight with him.
Instead of a knight, a bunch of oddly dressed dwarves come out of his closet. It turns out his bedroom is junction for Time Holes. A being of light with a thundering voice appears and demands the dwarves return a map. They run for it and Kevin runs with them.
They end up in the Napoleanic wars and Kevin gets read in. The entity that was pissed at them is the Supreme Being. Kevin asks if they men, God?
The leader of the Dwarves, Randall, says they don’t know him that well they just work for him. (As I said Gilliam was at pains to avoid overt religious overtones). The Dwarves used to work for him, while the Supreme did the big things like good and evil they did little things like trees and shrubbery. A school of thought that is not without precedent in theology but I’m not getting into that either. The map they stole charts all of the time holes throughout the whole of creation. It shows when and where they will be. David Rapport as Randal carried the movie on his diminutive shoulders, he was the best little person actor since the legendary Michael Dunn.
They also have an adversary, namely The Adversary but they call him Evil and not Satan. Regardless, he was played brilliantly by David Warner. Evil was defined by comically blowing up his henchmen and his fascination with computers, (something I find vaguely worrying today).
Kevin and the minor elohim have adventures first in historical settings, Napoleon, Robin Hood, Agamemnon (Connery) and the Titanic. Then they are lead by Evil to the Time of Legends where they meet genuinely mythical creatures like ogres and a giant. Evil is leading them to his fortress/prison with the promise of great riches. Temptation has always been his thing.
Once there Evil gets the map, and locks up the team rather than kill them for some reason. They escape and gather a bunch of heroes from across time and space. Evil destroys those comedically and effortlessly. He’s going to wipe out Kevin and company but then there is close to literal deus ex machina ending. The Supreme Being appears blasts evil into charcoal and provides some very unsatisfactory explanations for why he was “testing” Evil. It’s all very vauge any you could tell that Gilliam and Palin couldn’t come up with anything better.
Kevin is informed by God that he had to continue the fight and then Kevin wakes up in bed, surrounded by smoke because his house is on fire. The fireman who rescues him is Sean Connery. Kevin finds the polaroids he took in his pocket so he knows his adventures were real. Then his parents are killed because a chunk of Evil was lodged in their toaster. They touched it and exploded. Kind of a what the fuck ending for a kid’s movie if you ask me.
Does it hold up?
Good question. I normally know whether I’ve enjoyed a movie or not but this one has always kind of left me scratching my head. It did have an obvious technical flaw with the audio, half the time you can barely hear what’s going on and have to crank the volume then turn it way down again. The only other pronounced flaw was the celebrity cameos. Look here’s Michael Palin, he’s going to do Micheal Palin stuff, look here’s John Cleese he’s going to say “Jolly good.” Look, look, look it’s Sean Connery!!! Some people view the cameos as part of the film’s charm, but it knee capped the movie’s pacing so far as I’m concerned.
On the other hand it had its moments of genuine brilliance and achieved them on a shoestring budget. Things like, the Fortress of Ulitmate Darkness being made with oversized Legos or a giant wearing a schooner as a hat. Or God being played by Sir Ralph Richardson (that cameo did work but it was Ralph Richardson). Terry Gilliam showcased the human need to escape the crushing problems of the world through imagination. It’s better than anything that’s been made for the last ten years, that’s for sure.
Kevin’s dissatisfaction with his parents dull materialistic life was a lot more representative of Silents and Boomers than Generation-X and that is ultimately the problem with Time Bandits. It was a kids’ film made for adults.
At the end of the day, this was the movie that Gilliam had to make in order to learn how to make Brazil.
