Back in November I read Timeline by Michael Crichton. Tonight I finally had the opportunity to watch it on DVD with a buddy who came over for dinner. I have to say, I was pretty disappointed 🙁 I mean, I knew it wasn’t going to be anywhere near as good as the book, movies almost never are. The book as Mithrandir commented, wasn’t the best of the best either, but compared to the movie, well it was about 100x richer and deeper.
They basically took the book and made it a readers digest version, but made sure they stripped out the really interesting parts. All the cool stuff to explain how they achieved time travel (hint: they didn’t), and the quantum physics, or even the base explanations were gone… I believe they said “well, we did it” and that was the most explanation about how it was done. The big curved water containers to keep out alpha particles (would have been much cooler looking if they’d done it the way it was described), gone as well. Language problems? Nope. Transmitters in their ears? Nothing of the sort. The plot between them going back in time and coming back at the end had only a shadow of resemblance to the events in the book.
Even as a movie alone it seemed a bit flakey (though it could be just because of my familiarity of the book) with some bad acting, some acts of romance that were just completely out of place (“random frenching”), and a pretty thin storyline (all that nifty stuff at the end of the book about the real purpose of the machine? gone!).
I know I shouldn’t be disappointed, but I was. If you’re thinking about renting this, go read the book instead, you’ll have a much better time.