Wait just a friggin’ minute. How can Billy Connelly be old enough to play the professor?!?
Aaaauuuugggghhhh!
I really hope this doesn’t suck. But I have to admit, I’ve already seen it- visualized it while reading it. Crichton is no hack, but he is way too lazy nowadays.
It was the perfect Jurassic Park formula all over again- evil rich bad guy with lots of flunkys creates “new science” to make himself even more rich; scientist-type and some relatively innocent bystanders get caught up in the plot somehow; oooh, dazzling special effects possibilities; everything goes to shit, and a bunch of people die badly; there is a secret bad thing or bad guy who almost triumphs; good guys persevere; bad evil guy gets destroyed by his own invention.
I don’t mind the Jurassic Park books which I thought were superior to the respective movies, but I absolutely hated Timeline. For all I know, still might make a good movie though.
See the “Alternate Universes” thread in GD. It has a similar explanation to the “Timeline” explanation.
IIRC, there simultaneously exists a version of every possible universe. Ours just happens to have the professors glasses from the 1400s. I also recall there being an issue of the time traveler knowing if he returned to his own universe.
The movie should be a welcomed addition to the “time travel back to ye olde days” genre which includes Army of Darkness, Black Knight and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Does anyone know if the “Green knight” will be in the film? I want to see a character that seems to have been stolen from Monty Python’s rejected idea file.
It was a good book for an airplane flight, but as soon as I started to think about it it all fell apart. Should make a decent movie.
My brother in law got me Prey for Christmas. I wish he would have gotten me a $20 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. That book was awful. I couldn’t even finish it. Unlike MC’s older work (Jurrassic Park, Great Train Robbery, etc.) I didn’t give a rats patootie about the people in the story.
Timeline was the same way. MC was so wrapped up in the “science” of it he forgot the people. Perhaps MC needs to take lessons from Gene Roddenberry.
I liked Timeline a lot as a book and I agree with you guys that it was written as a movie, but I thought it was a good story. I’m planning on not seeing the movie, though. You get your heart broken enough times (Jurassic Park, Lost World, Sphere, Congo, Jurassic Park 3(What was I thinking?)) and you lose interest. I’ll stick to the books.
Sort of. I haven’t read the book recently, so I’ll try to recall the book’s “science” of time travel. Basically, the idea is that there exists infinite universes parallel to our own. Also key is the idea that particles from these universes interfere with the particles from our own universe. Hence, the flashlight experiment at the beginning ended with a random dispersion pattern, even though only one particle was shot at a time. Therefore, the explanation is that the particles from the professor’s glasses and message in the ancient France universe interfered with the particles in our own universe, causing what looked like the professor’s glasses and his message to be found by the team.
Timeline is the only book by MC I’ve read. I basically picked it up to check out what his writing was all about, since he’s sold a gazillion books. I absolutely, totally hated it. t sucked in so many ways, I can’t begin to pick it apart, because the hamsters would all kick the bucket.
However, all my complaints have to do with his style of writing. Very mechanical, uninspired prose, bad work with the characters, terrible clichés. The story and ideas on the other hand, worked very well. I found the concept to be intrigueing and the motivations about building such a theme park thought provocing.
It’s sort of an axiom that to make a great movie, take a crappy book, and to make a crappy movie, take a great book. Correctly explored and with a smart screenplay, this might just turn out to be more than a decent popcorn movie.
Evil/Arrogant Organization causes a crisis by tinkering with poorly-understood technology, calls in unsuspecting group of experts to help. Crisis deepens. Minor group members perish. Things look bleak. Heroic effort risking self-sacrifice saves the day.
That being said, I love to read his stuff.
For me, the earlier MC works at least read like books. Some of them are more interesting than others, but at least it felt like I was reading a novel. There was depth of thought and moments that were felt, not merely observed.
the last few (and Timeline defiinitely falls into this camp) read like a poor adaptation of a screenplay into novel form --or-- the book is a long-form treatment of the screenplay for purposes of selling it.
>Sort of. I haven’t read the book recently, so I’ll try to recall the book’s “science” of time travel. Basically, the idea is that there exists infinite universes parallel to our own. Also key is the idea that particles from these universes interfere with the particles from our own universe. Hence, the flashlight experiment at the beginning ended with a random dispersion pattern, even though only one particle was shot at a time. Therefore, the explanation is that the particles from the professor’s glasses and message in the ancient France universe interfered with the particles in our own universe, causing what looked like the professor’s glasses and his message to be found by the team.<
I’ve been going over the physics (“guantum foam, makes me roam…”) with another reader, and we are both a little fuzzy in this area. I wondered what a learned physicist would have to say. I dislike sloppy science in sci-fi, but this seemed a decent proposal for time travel. Usually in time travel stories, the author just presents the machine without much real explanation as to how it works.
But with any Crichton, once you are safely out of “Exposition Park,” the action picks up a lot.
My first Crichton novel was Jurassic Park, which I liked a lot. The movie was pretty good too, espcially the breakthrough f/x. I eagerly read JPII and it sucked. Big time. It read like a Michael Bay movie. Horribly cliched dialogue and plot devices. Awful, awful. I avoided the movie and all JP sequels after that.
I said that to say this: Timeline was even worse. I love time travel books/movies, so that was a plus, but the whole thing was stupid. The genesis of the story was cool, but it was written to be a big-budget hollywood blockbuster and there was not a clever use of the story at all. Totally cliched, paint-by-numbers. Rich evil business mogul? check. Evil scarfaced villian? check. Handsome studly hero-man? check. Nerdy science guy? check. Attractive, young, smart female? check.
It was a completely derivative travesty, and I could tell you in each chapter what was going to happen next. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It’s made me swear off Crichton forever.
I hope the movie bombs big-time to discourage more of his dreck from being published.
In the book, his lead character (the evil Bill Gates type) talks about the entertainment potential of sending people back into the past. But, despite all their planning, Something Goes Wrong. Ohmigod, it’s Jurassic Park all over again. No, it’s even older – it’s the “Medieval Times” section of Delos in Westworld.
I actually like Crichton, specially his expositions. I find that his books entertain as well as educate. That said, Timeline started as a really kinetic read, but lost a lot of pace in the middle (personally, I felt as if he had run out of a story to tell). I stopped reading at page 400 or so (back in early 2001!). Guess I will have to pick it up again before the film hits theaters.
One of the big snags for me was the time travel process as described. Sounded too much like Star Trek’s transporter mechanism (which I never really got either). Basically ones body is recorded, destroyed, and beamed over some sort of paratronic pseudo beam and reconstituted in another place/time. I just don’t get what good an exact copy of me with my memories would do for my vaporized self.
I liked the book, and the trailer looked pretty nifty (E! had it on its preview show recently, too), but I have one question.
In the book, it was the professor who went back in time (or to the other dimension, or whatever), right? But I coulda sworn in the preview it was a “dad.” Huh.
