A Critical Look at Criterion's 4K Release of "Time Bandits"

Luke Thompson finds setting up the 4K for viewing almost as quirky as the film. Was it worth it?

[Editor’s Note — Today’s Geekerati Post is a review by award winning film and tv critic Luke Y. Thompson. He’s been featured in Forbes, Onion A.V., ComingSoon, LA Weekly, and a host of other film review sites. It’s a real honor to be able to publish him here. As the site grows, I’d like to feature him and more professional critics on the site. I’ll certainly be reaching out to him and others for more YouTube interviews and chats.]

Having not seen Time Bandits in a couple of decades at least, I was excited to watch it afresh on the new Criterion Collection 4K, hoping that watching a childhood favorite with new-old eyes would allow new discoveries and interpretations to unfurl. It didn't quite go that way.

Here's why: Time Bandits imprinted and hardwired itself into me like Star Wars, ever since my father excitedly took me the first time, and I had no idea what “Monty Python” was or why he was so interested in “a bunch of dwarves that travel through time, and there's a God-person and a Devil-person.” Needless to say, we went back more than once.

In the early '80s, only rich families in Ireland (where I lived) had VCRs, but my father later bought me the published screenplay, which was my introduction to screenplay format. I obsessed over that, and we read it aloud together several times, alternating roles. And because it was a Terry Gilliam screenplay, he actually filled the published version with in-jokes. When discussing King Agamemnon's reveal as Sean Connery, for example, the description reads, “He smiles as only Sean can,” followed by the parenthetical, “I told you, we've got Connery, we don't need to do this – ed].” A kid who knows nothing about the movie business isn't going to get that joke, but one who remembers it until he's old enough to, will. Other humorous bits in it included fake script shorthand terms like P.B.T.R.N.T. (Pull Back To Reveal No Trousers). Even a kid will find that funny.

As a result, I find that I still know almost every line in the movie, word for word, still; and more, since the published shooting script included some deleted dialogue and scenes. Even after years away from it, it can't surprise me. On the one hand, that maintains the magic in a very real way. On the other, its ability to sidestep my critical faculties in that way make it a more challenging review.

Retroactively part of Gilliam's trilogy of the imagination, Time Bandits features history-obsessed young Kevin (Craig Warnock, in his one and only starring role), who finds himself journeying through history and mythology with six little-person robbers (David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Malcolm Dixon, Mike Edmonds, and Tiny Ross) on the run from the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson and others), from whom they've stolen a map of time holes. For Kevin, this marks an exciting break from his mundane life with TV- and gadget-obsessed parents, and may in fact be all a dream, as his adventures mirror his toy and poster collection in his bedroom almost exactly. Disney tends to slap a lawsuit on other properties with seven dwarfs, so Time Bandits, like Snow White and the Huntsman, works around it. The seventh dwarf, Horseflesh, has died before the events of the movie.

Image from Criterion Website

As a kid, I identified with Kevin, being as fond of Greek myths as he (and probably having the same sort of accent, as I was raised by an English mother). As an adult, I find more to critique in Warnock's acting – there's a lot of mugging when he's supposed to look surprised, and at times he's clearly having so much fun that he fails to look as scared as he ought. Gilliam's running themes come through more clearly, especially his hatred of modernity and technology, denoting plastic wrapping as the ultimate evil, and having Evil (David Warner) obsess over computers and lasers.

Editor Julian Doyle pulls off some impressive visual effects simply by cutting judiciously, using tricks that will be nigh-invisible to anyone not using them. Miek Moran's score, meanwhile, gives the gang a theme that John Williams' Ewok themes would later (perhaps unconsciously) emulate, ironically since some of these performers would go on to become Ewoks.

Another major recurring Gilliam motif is one of almost classical Greek comedy, in which the greats and legends of history are brought down to size with human foibles. Napoleon (Ian Holm) is obsessed with height; Robin Hood (John Cleese) is condescending and elitist. Even an apparent good-guy father figure like Sean Connery's King Agamemnon shares a crucial, timeless parental flaw: he doesn't listen to his kid's warnings of danger. Terrifying ogres have middle-age pains like the rest of us, and even God made so many mistakes with the fabric of the universe that there's a whole map pointing out where repairs need to be made. Gilliam, who has always seen himself as a bit of an outsider and outlaw, relates to these anarchic little people taking advantage of universal flaws to engage in robberies. In a rare bit of almost self-reflection, he repeatedly notes on the commentary track that they're actually terrible people, but they're endearing because they're so eccentric.

Image from Criterion Website

Before going any further, I should note that all the extras on the Criterion 4K are the same as they were on the Blu-ray, and the commentary track is older than that, from the '90s Criterion laserdisc. The package includes the previous Blu-ray, now with a second 4K disc which, to Criterion's credit, also includes the commentary track so you can hear it over the higher quality imagery.

But back to Gilliam on the commentary (which also includes bits by Warnock, Warner, and Michael Palin, with one drop-in by Cleese for his sole scene). Recent years and a memoir by Sarah Polley have made it clearer than ever that Gilliam's reputation for chaotic sets is more his own fault than he'd previously let on, allowing corporate studios to take a lot of the blame. He's also taken some #MeToo sexism flack, and frankly, some of it was there all along but ignored. Back on the laserdisc commentary, he laughs about injuring Shelley Duvall by recklessly demonstrating a stunt he had no business doing, and at the notion that the little people had to do their own stunts because he couldn't find stunt people their size.

Later Gilliam movies like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote would go way over-budget and prove dangerously unsafe in some cases, but with Time Bandits, a more contradictory picture emerges. In a featurette with his costume and set designer, we hear about a man who maximized his small budget by renting historical costumes from other productions, storyboarding carefully, and only shooting the parts of the set he actually needed. Low angles representing the POV of a child and dwarfs make everything look larger than it is, and forced perspective and black studio backdrops go a long way. For ancient Greece, he even found pristine Moroccan ruins that have since been used by many major historical films, but were new-to-screen in 1981.

Gilliam the efficient filmmaker and Gilliam the reckless endangerer aren't entirely contradictory – there's a sense that if he suffers for his art, and can be amused by his own torment, others should suck it up too, even when, for example, locals tasked with guarding the ladies' restroom use the opportunity to peep. That's not how this works – but it is, perhaps, how a (white cishet male) member of a comedy troupe might think rather than the helmer of a massive studio production.

The song written by George Harrison for the movie features lyrics purportedly aimed at Gilliam, and they speak volumes:

“Greedy feeling wheeling dealing
Losing what you won
See the dream come undone
Stumble you may with the elementary
Lucky you got so far
All you owe is apologies
Measure the mystery and astound
Without taking up time
So the handiworks remain there
Only a dream away”

Duvall shows up later on the disc in an interview with Tom Snyder (the late TV talk-show host, not the right-wing evangelical film critic), and also talks about her injury, which causes Snyder to attempt a bad double-entendre around the word “coccyx,” which she literally broke. (The casual misogyny of the '80s can still surprise me.) She's otherwise her charming self, and with both Time Bandits and The Shining in the rearview, shows no signs of having had her brain broken by either, contrary to popular myth. The film's trailer, designed as a parody of a trailer and delivering what we would now consider many major spoilers, is very funny, but best viewed after the film. It must have confused the hell out of viewers in 1981, but clearly looked to lean on the Monty Python angle.

There's also a long interview with Gilliam by film scholar Peter von Bagh, recorded at the 1998 Midnight Sun Film Festival. It deals with almost everything BUT Time Bandits, and leans into Gilliam's amiable, fun guy side. As is often the case, the Blu-ray booklet includes a critical essay, this time by David Sterritt, and it folds out into a mini-replica of the movie's signature map.

So all that aside, how's the 4K? The disc is sensitive. At first, it just kept flickering, cutting to black and back, till I tightened every cable as best I could. Now it seems to do it one time before settling in, but it's more persnickety than some of my other 4Ks. How much of this is my machine, versus the disc? I don't know. But make sure your player is in tip-top shape first. Once that's done, you should be all right. The colors are more vibrant, the night scenes blacker, the fabrics super-tactile. Gilliam and Palin's script is full of throw-away jokes in the dialogue, and the sound mix gives them more room to be heard. Gilliam notes some details you can only see on the laserdisc – they’re here, like Sean Connery's face when he sees Kevin has disappeared, or the Merry Man behind Wally picking his nose and rubbing his finger on Wally's hat. Some of the backdrops in the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness look more like paintings, but it's a fair trade, and weird enough to work anyway.

It's not a massive, revolutionary leap over the Blu-ray, but it's better. Worth the upgrade? That depends on you. If you already have half the discs in this set, wait for the new one to go on sale. But if this is your first Time Bandits, or at least your first since DVD, you ought to be happy.