Timeline is a time waster

The past is dead, and the latest movie based on the works of popular novelist Michael Crichton might not be too far from it. Timeline, adapted from the book of the same name, markets itself as a high adventure thrill ride, but a combination of lifeless acting and a badly-adapted screenplay may have doomed it to linger forever in Blockbuster alongside other Crichton flops like Congo and Sphere.

The premise of the movie is simple enough -- a group of archaeologists are sent back to the fourteenth century in newly developed, but far from fully tested, time machine, in order to save their professor. They are then forced to outwit the English, battle the French, and create the inevitable chicken-or-the-egg time traveling paradox in order to find their way home again. It's Apollo 13 meets Robin Hood, sci-fi and historical fiction all crammed together as the hapless academics try to put their life's study to practical use.

But instead of getting with the times or living in the moment, all the time-tossed archaeologists do is whine. And whine. And whine. No matter that at the beginning of the movie, the characters were preaching the virtues of the past and proclaiming that all they want to do is see their dig site in its heyday; once they're actually given the opportunity, they seem to take their chance of a lifetime as an excuse to spend the rest of the two hour movie crying about how they want to go home. Their life's passion? Who cares! Apparently, history isn't interesting in the slightest once you start living it.

The majority of the characters are such crybabies, it's nearly impossible to

care about them. Paul Walker is boring and emotionally flat in his portrayal of lead Chris Johnston that it's as if he's playing a corpse. His interaction with his love interest, Kate Erickson (played by Frances O'Connor), is almost painful in its predictability and it's incredibly hard to invest any emotional attention in a pair of characters whose idea of charisma seems to be nothing more than collapsing in tears in each others' arms because they'll never see the twentieth century again.

The movie itself is only saved by the work of Gerard Butler, who deserves the

lead credit far more than Walker for his role as archaeologist Andre Marek. Unlike his comrades, Marek's enthusiasm for the time period is contagious; his solo sequences, which include sword fights and dashing rescues, seem almost as if they belong to another movie entirely, despite being interspersed with the griping academics' scenes. Butler's character is the only modern individual in the entire movie who truly "gets" it, who understands that he's been given the chance of a lifetime and wants to do what he can to enjoy it. The story itself would be much stronger if it had deviated more from the book and focused upon his story instead of his crybaby companions.

And there, perhaps, lies the rub. Director Richard Donner is so intent on

preserving Crichton's original story that he creates a slipshod, schizophrenic final product. Condensing a five hundred page novel into a two-hour movie is no easy feat, but Donner's attempt doesn't even approach dismal. There are too many tech babble sequences which do nothing but confuse and too many boring characters who do nothing but complain. The story itself would have been much stronger if the director had cut the complicated explanations and trusted more in the audience's suspension of disbelief, or just cut the grumbling entirely and focused more on the action.

In fact, the moments where Donner does dare to deviate from Crichton's

vision prove to be some of the strongest. He fleshes out the lifeless, unbelievable

character of Lady Claire (Anna Friel) into someone that captures the audience's imagination and allows Butler to strike out on his own, which provides for the best action sequences in the movie.

It's hard to picture anyone as being afraid of offending Crichton purists, but that almost seems to be Donner's problem. He's so afraid of disgusting fans that he avoids cutting the scenes and characters which don't translate well to the big screen. One would have hoped that he would have taken a page from Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, which was heralded because it was a good movie and not because it stayed close to Crichton's original story (which it certainly didn't), but instead he chooses to turn what could have been an enjoyable swashbuckling movie into a half-medieval combat, half-whining "we want to go home" mess.

And it's not that the movie itself has no good moments. The action

sequences are lively, the shots of medieval warfare fascinating, but the slipshod

explanations of politics (the English hate the French, yes, that's easy to understand, but why exactly are they burning their own village?) and the random insertions of techno babble take away from the breathtaking special effects.

In the end, Timeline is hardly worth the time it takes to buy a ticket. Fans of the book will be far better off waiting for it to come out on video, when they can fast forward through the tech talk and the complaints and just watch the action.