A Pretty Bad ‘Time’

The Apple TV+ series Time Bandits, which dropped its first two episodes on July 24, is an enlightening experience. Created by Jemaine Clement, Iain Morris, and Taika Waititi, and telling the story of a bunch of weirdos and a little kid traveling through history to steal stuff like some sort of…temporal thieves or whatever, it’s definitive proof that it takes a minimum of three people to screw up the cinematic equivalent of a teacher telling you to: “Draw your favorite animal in whatever style you like, as long as you have fun with it.” Let’s unpack this metaphor.

The show is based on the 1981 Terry Gilliam movie of the same name and premise but completely different execution. The original Time Bandits is a very chaotic film that more resembles a series of vignettes, each one set in a different time period or fantasy land, and each operating on “Because Terry Gilliam” logic. Why were the titular time bandits all little people who dressed like Mad Max collided with Spirit Halloween? Because Terry Gilliam. Why did a silly movie that basically got through its runtime with no stakes or sense of peril end on a super dark and depressing note? Because Terry Gilliam. Why was there a human-eating ogre on a ship that turned out to be the hat of a giant fat guy who lived in the sea? Because… hold on, I can’t read my own imaginary handwriting. Oh, it says: “Because Terry Gilliam.”

Weirdly, this makes Time Bandits”prime remake content. Since its “plot” is just a series of loosely-stringed-together excuses for all manner of jokes, any filmmaker should be salivating at a chance to put their own spin on it. You keep the time-traveling angle (you kinda must, given the title) and you replace the Terry Gilliam-isms with your own brand of wacky, experimental humor. It’s basically a blank check to do any kind of comedy you want. Dark, wordplay, a guy wearing a ridiculous hat (not the giant; there are a number of goofy hats in the original.) Absolutely nothing is off the table. “Draw your favorite animal in whatever style you like, as long as you have fun with it.” The Apple remake unpacks this metaphor and wildly misunderstands it.

The jokes in Time Bandits are sparse and lack their own identity. Some are also just lazily cliché. How are we still making the “kids choose an injured/handicapped boy instead of the nerdy hero when picking teams during PE class” gag in the year 2024? However, the biggest clue the series has no idea what it should be doing is the hint of an overarching lesson that it ultimately means us learn, and which boils down to: history=good, technology =bad. In the show, a British boy named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck) is ridiculed by his electronics-obsessed family for loving history but he sure makes them look like stupid idiots when he gets involved with the Time Bandits and uses his history powers to history his way out of historical jams.

The original Kevin (Craig Warnock) also had a neglectful family who were a little too preoccupied with technology. But none of that served any kind of moral. His folks parodied of a middle-class family fixated on materialistic things as a status symbol but the film didn’t exaggerate or involve them in the plot enough to count it as some kind of biting satire. For the most part, they were a kind of background People Who Actually Existed. Remake Kevin’s family aren’t people who exist. No adults out there are scolding their child for reading too many books and telling them they’d rather communicate through smartphones even if they’re sitting in the same room. Just… what?

This isn’t a case of “It’s different from the original so it’s bad” because it’s not actually different. In Terry Gilliam’s movie, it was the embodiment of Evil (David Warner) who was the tech-head but not, again, for any deeper, satirical reasons but because Satan talking about his love of microchips etc. is kind of funny. In the end, neither historical knowledge nor tech defeat him, but rather a literal deus ex machina. And yet, the Time Bandits series looks like it’s setting up the conflict between history and tech as a focal point of its story. It’s taking elements that were technically there in the movie but then painfully twists them to make a POINT, which definitely was not in the source material.

There are still a few jokes in the Time Bandits series that land, but it has sacrificed too many gags to make room for, ugh, the plot, even though the original ran more on vibes than anything else. At every turn, you can’t help but feel disappointed by the constant wasted opportunities, especially as the TV Bandits visit different time periods than their movie counterparts, which should lend itself to brand-new jokes. But instead, we mainly get variations of “folks being a little too genre-savvy and talking like 21^st-century people despite not being from the 21^st-century.” This doesn’t necessarily make Time Bandits bad. If you’ve never seen the original movie, you might be able to get something out of the show, but it will never be as fulfilling as Terry Gilliam’s plot-less cavalcade of silly people being silly in silly situations for silliness’ sake.