Thanks to Steven Spielberg and his various acolytes, ’80s kids didn’t lack for entertainment made directly for us. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t periodically traumatized by a Gremlins or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or, in the case of my younger brother, The ‘Burbs.
Nobody, though, specialized in making movies that were ostensibly for kids but definitely weren’t for all kids like Terry Gilliam. One of my first moviegoing memories is abruptly leaving a revival screening of Jabberwocky because it wasn’t the movie my parents thought it was. Audiences experienced similar unease with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and, before that, 1981’s Time Bandits, a frequently playful juvenile romp that’s also nonstop dark imagery and narrative jagged edges. The film replicates the chaotic weirdness of childhood dreams, but resists any of the pat moralizing that often anchors kid-friendly storytelling.
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Time Bandits
Most of those jagged edges have been sanded off for Apple TV+‘s new take on Time Bandits, which concentrates on the “romp” side of the original, very much to the exclusion of the weirdness. It’s typical of co-creator and occasional series director Taika Waititi, whose entire sensibility could be summed up as “Terry Gilliam with bowling bumpers.”
One needn’t take that comparison as an insult. Gilliam could sometimes benefit from bowling bumpers. This Time Bandits spends four or five chapters — out of 10 episodes running between 30 and 46 minutes — as something flat, but amiably so. I ran out of interest in the show’s bland efforts to replicate the movie almost exactly at the point Time Bandits finally begins to find its own story, its own approach to the time-traveling conceit and its own voice. Between episodes six and nine, Time Bandits hits a fine gear in which it’s actively funny and clever and just a little bit emotional.
The series, which features Jemaine Clement and Iain Morris as creators along with Waititi, begins efficiently. We’re quickly introduced to Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), an 11-year-old obsessed with history and entirely uninterested in keeping the fruits of the obsession to himself. As a result of Kevin’s nerdiness, he gets picked last for everything at school and his parents are constantly urging him to do normal kid things. Even his younger sister Saffron (Kiera Thompson) picks on him.
Outside of his books and his elaborate models, Kevin’s life is quite dull, until he discovers that his bedroom wardrobe is a portal, a “time egress,” and out burst five traveling time bandits — uncomfortable leader Penelope (Lisa Kudrow), empath Judy (Charlyne Yi), aspiring actor Alto (Tadhg Murphy), very large Bittelig (Rune Temte) and Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), their chief navigator.
The bandits, who used to work for the Supreme Being (Waititi), have stolen a precious map — “a celestial chart of the anomalies and portals of the intimately interwoven intricacies of time, space, good and bad and all the dimensions including one, two, three and four and it allows us to travel throughout the universe,” Penelope explains — which they hope to use to zip through time stealing treasure. The Supreme Being isn’t happy with the loss of his map, while his adversary Pure Evil (Clement) is malevolently thrilled that the powerful artifact is suddenly in play. Pure Evil dispatches Fianna (Rachel House), a huntress who shoots fire lasers from her eyes, to secure the map by any means necessary.
Speaking of maps, the movie gave the creators an easy one. As odd as it is, the movie is purely episodic. Kevin and the bandits hop from significant historical era to significant historical era not quite understanding how the map works, while comic embodiments of good and evil plot their downfall. The movie is full of laughs, but despite the presence of John Cleese and Michael Palin in supporting roles, it isn’t overtly Monty Python-y — perhaps because co-writers Palin and Gilliam wanted to do something that felt separate from a sequel to Holy Grail or Life of Brian.
The series creators don’t feel the same pressure to avoid self-repetition, and the first half of the season plays like talented people content to do Monty Python karaoke. In the process of polishing away those rough edges, they adopt little traces of Mel Brooks and, in the composition of this group of bandits, the ensemble ends up resembling both the British and CBS versions of Ghosts. There are chuckles to be found, but they’re derivative chuckles, especially in one episode about the Trojan horse and another set in the Middle Ages. The show is very talk-heavy and even though it’s self-aware about its structure, the pattern of hopping into a portal, arriving in a new time, having Kevin lecture everybody about various historical personages, solving a minor problem and leaping into the next period becomes first familiar and then dull.
The history — unlike the movie, the series wants to at least deliver educational tidbits, along with life lessons — and the storytelling momentum and the general filmmaking progress in unremarkable ways. So much of why the film has become such a cult favorite stems from the DIY approach to special effects and sets and locations, while so much of the series, filmed in New Zealand, just settles for “pretty.”
The first half of the season is still a chance for Tuck to convey an enthusiastic, pleasingly unstudied screen presence, and for the show to hone Kudrow’s tart line deliveries, Murphy’s theatrical histrionics and Nsengiyumva’s good-natured confusion. After a couple of strong early punchlines revolving around Judy struggling to make use of her empathetic skills, the series loses track of how to use Yi’s trademark deceptive deadpan; the character vanishes in a way that would be unceremonious even if Yi hadn’t been very public about the behind-the-scenes difficulties they experienced during the production.
The series’ transition from something forgettably entertaining coincides with an increased focus on Thompson’s Saffron, whose energy is completely different and whose presence on a history-spanning adventure of her own allows Time Bandits to, finally, establish its own terrain and even its own approach to the paradoxes of time travel. The seventh and eighth episodes, written by Clement, put Thompson and Saffron at the forefront and some hilarity ensues, both in how the series gives Saffron a clearer personal arc than Kevin was provided and in how her droll, slang-y and youthfully sardonic delivery fuels the show’s take on anachronism and dramatic irony. It’s a series-shifting character and performance in the best way possible.
I’m not quite sure the show has figured out how to make Clement and Waititi’s characters into fully integrated adversaries — it keeps being like, “Meanwhile, back in the places we’re not calling Heaven or Hell …” — though there’s some complexity to the way that “good” and “evil” are depicted. The closing episodes set the series up interestingly for future seasons. Kudrow, in particular, gets several beats in the home stretch that turn Penelope from just a source of scathing one-liners into somebody sympathetic and human. And the series finds a smart way to begin to address the dwarf erasure that occurred in the transition from big to small screen.
The new gear that Time Bandits finds in its second half isn’t necessarily ambitious or inspired, and it definitely won’t traumatize young viewers — decide for yourself if a less disturbing, less bizarre Time Bandits is a pro or con — but it’s fun and something I’d happily watch more of.
