Turning books into films has become the number one way to make a box-office hit or an Oscar contender, but never fear Timeline won’t have either of those problems.
I think Timeline‘s Frances O’Connor said it best in an interview with SCI-FI Wire when she said, “I don’t think it’s as detailed as the book, but you can’t really put all those details in a film, because you’ve only got like 90 minutes to do it.”
To Frances’s defense Timeline is more like 120 minutes but as for the rest of it she has hit the nail on the head.
Just like other Michael Crichton novels (Jurassic Park, Congo, Sphere) the intricacies and details that make his novels so intriguing and original are lost in the movie world in order to satisfy time constraints and due to the inability of being able to convey specifics told on paper into mind-bending drama on the screen.
It would also help if we could get a cast to work with. Just as in Jurassic Park a cast of virtual nobodies, lead by Fast and Furious star, Paul Walker, a team of student archaeologists digging at a medieval site in France when suspicious clues begin turning up at the dig that lead back to the student’s professor (Connolly).
Quick to the phone is the professor’s son, Chris (Walker), to the dig’s benefactor, International Technology Corporation (ITC) and the man who runs it, Robert Doniger (Thewlis). The group soon learns that their professor has been sent back to the 14th century and is lost, and they have been chosen to go back and get him.
