Timeline
I want a catapult for Christmas.
That said, this movie would have been good if it had had decent acting, passable writing, competent production design and respectable direction. It had none of those things.
The biggest failing of this Michael Crichton time-travel “epic” is its deadly dullness. And how can you make the combination of time travel and medieval combat dull? Bad acting, writing, production design and direction, that’s how. I was especially struck by how cheap and thrown-together everything looked – it was like “Excalibur” put on by third graders. The whole movie felt like a bunch of rehearsal scenes strung together at the last minute when the final takes were destroyed in a fire.
Give this premise to, say, James Cameron, and replace the it-insults-wood-to-call-him-wooden Paul Walker with someone interesting (dare I say Colin Farrell?), and you might very well have something. This, not so much.
(ahem)
Trebuchet.
____________
I go now.
Adam, Sure this is not the greatest movie about time travel or knights in shining armor, but is was fun ! The flaming arrows flying through the night air, the sword fights, the losing of an ear. What more could you ask for. How about the evil Bill Gates character, he was riveting. I think you were much to hard on this movie.
Steve: The arrows were fun. But don’t get me started on the ear issue. Overall, though, I just sat there cataloguing the ways this movie stumbled. And that’s not a good sign.
I didn’t finish the movie. I went to the bathroom shortly after the words “Greek Fire” and could not make myself go back in. Instead, I sat in the hallway outside the theatre and listened to the long yell broken by seconds of silence (when they were back at the lab). The movie had two levels — yell and silence.
It was not fun. It was not mindless entertainment. It was two hours of my life where I forgot to bring a book with me and the mall was already closed for the evening.
Matt: I do like the word “trebuchet,” but “catapult” is more fun to say. Plus, it’s alliteration with “Christmas.”
I recently saw a kit for building your own miniature catapult (definately not a trebuchet).
I helped my daughter build a catapult for a school science project. It was fun. A few pieces of scrap lumber, $6.95 worth of random hardware from the hardware store, no particular woodworking aptitude, oh, and a length of surgical tubing from the local pharmacy (had to ask for it; they don’t stock it in public view in the weird little transplanted-Bible-belt community I live in), and voila: she was launching rocks down the street at the neighbors’ cars.
Got the second-best distance in the entire 7th grade, too (*beams proudly*).
Personally, though, I make it an ironclad rule never to watch any movie that has Richard Donner’s name associated with it. I may have missed something of quality that way, but overall I think I’m way ahead of the game.
i haven’t seen this. but the television commercial actually made me laugh out loud it was so lame looking. i hadn’t laughed that loud at a ridiculous trailer since that movie about drilling to the middle of the earth that had hillary swank in it. “the core” i think it was called. you know, the one where the earth’s core might STOP SPINNING while the rest of the earth kept going. mahahahaha.
I read the book, and was bored by it. Then I saw the movie and liked the book a lot more.