#time bandits 2024

[eddie-redcliffe]

What We Do in the Shadows (2014) - Time Bandits (2024)

[meluli]

[notfspurejam]

A very happy birthday to the one and only Mark Gatiss!

[frooogscream]

[amuseoffyre]

My big project this month (aside from event planning) has been working on the glorious entity that is Pure Evil from Time Bandits (2024) as played by the one and only Jemaine Clement.

And yes, of course I had to go for his finale outfit because how could I NOT?? Any villain who dresses as his own lair wins my whole heart.

Yes, I also did battle with a glue gun on several occasions. Also also his hat is TOL. This is by far and away the most intricate muppet costume I have made to date because it's also architecture and functional lighting because the second I saw that light-up breastplate, I was done for.

[mask131]

Why the Time Bandits remake makes me feel an angry despair (1)

I announced it before: I am mounting my high horses for this matter.

"Time Bandits" is a children fantasy movie by Terry Gilliam, released in 1981. It is one of those "almost Monty-Python-movies" thanks to two other Monty Python actors joining Gilliam's project: John Cleese, playing Robin Hood, and Michael Palin playing a poor guy who keeps being reincarnated throughout history and always has the worst love life. This movie is part of the "Imagination Trilogy" of Gilliam, meant to represent the "childhood imagination" - alongside the dark movie "Brazil", for "adult imagination", and Gilliam's adaptation of the Adventures of the Baron Münchausen, for "old man imagination".

I love Time Bandits. It isn't just that I love, I adore it. This was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and it was such a huge part of my childhood it literaly shaped my imagination in many, many ways. It is still to this day one of my favorite movies, with such a unique feeling I couldn't find anywhere else but in other Gilliam-related or Python-related movies.

It is one of these rare things where I can say I am really a huge fan. I bought the Criterion Collection DVD, I bought the official script-book, I went online to find alternate versions of the scripts which contained deleted scenes NOT in the official script-book...

I even chose this movie as the subject of my presentation for my high school diploma, doing a full analysis of it that gave me a very good grade. I am really in love with this piece.

NOW if you haven't heard about it, a trailer was released for an Apple + series of (10 episodes I think?). "2024 Time Bandits". A remake by Taika Waititi (among others but he is the main guy behind this).

I had heard of this project a long time ago because Waititi's desire to do something Time Bandits related has been around since his glory days with "What we do in the shadows". He kept speaking about how much he loved Time Bandits and how he wanted to do something related to it.

... I never realized he meant doing a remake a it. Time Bandits has so much potential for sequels or prequels or alternate takes or whatever cinematic terminology you have.

Now, that being said, I don't mind a remake. Waititi has proven to have good ideas and cool projects, and he seemed to really be a fan of the original - plus it was a project he had been dragging for quite some times, so I had still some interests and hopes...

... and then the trailer came out. And I saw it. And...

... You know it will be the first time in my life I will turn into one of those angry Internet ranters mad about a remake of their favorite thing. Never in my life before I was involved on a personal level with disliking a remake but OH BOY here I am.

There are so many things BAD with this trailer. Not wrong. BAD. I don't dislike all about the trailer... But I dislike most of it, and I don't just "dislike" it as in "Oh yeah, they could have done better", no, we are talking about a "I DESPISE this".

Honestly it looks like the people behind this series considered everything that made Time Bandits unique and powerful and cool and weird... and decided to remove it to make it bland, flat and... a sort of flavorless, mass-marketable Americanized modern vaguely super-hero like movie (did Waititi's experience on the Thor movies screwed his imagination THAT badly?)

I literaly do not understand how someone so hellbent and so dedicated to Time Bandits could create a product that looks like was designed by people who only vaguely heard of the original movie's plot. Because the people who made this series clearly did NOT understood the heart, soul or goal or the movie.

I heard something about Terry Gilliam being hired as an executive producer, coming on the set for a planned three months, but leaving abruptly after only three days and never returning. And people concluded that it was because he was pissed off. Seeing the trailer, I am inclined to believe he was.

[puppyboywinger]

“what do you mean this show doesn’t have a fandom!” and it’s a remake of a weird 80s movie no one has ever seen on a streaming service nobody uses.

[crimson-and-clover-1717]

I see your sea god, and I raise you…

[somelikeitbrugh]

*Cue the Mission Impossible theme*

[eddie-redcliffe]

[meluli]

(x)

[notfspurejam]

[frooogscream]

[martymcflown]

Have officially watched all of Time Bandits season 1. My thoughts right now:

-Cute!!!

-I would have definitely loved this show as a nerdy kid who was obsessed with Histories Mysteries.

-Multiple great examples of the lesson "history is written by the winners." Would be a good introduction to kids on the concept that preconceived notions pushed about certain cultures aren't necessarily fact just because they were written down in history books.

-That mammoth puppet was fucking sick as hell.

-Alto, my beloved.

-Jemaine steals every scene he's in but I knew that would happen. Meow meow.

-GREAT music. The intro is killer and it has variations pretty much every episode. There was also a beautiful piece of music in one of the last episodes that made me teary.

-I'm definitely not the target demographic at the present time, but I think it could be a lovely family show.

-I hope they get a season 2, it was a nice time.

Critiques:

-I honestly wish there were more episodes? Everything felt rushed to me and it seems like a concept tailor-made for longer seasons that don't necessarily have to have every episode be plot heavy. Some filler eps would have been a nice breather, and it would have given us more time with characters I genuinely liked.

-It does have my pet peeve with older generations writing younger generations where it's like..."everybody is addicted to their phone lol" and pretty cringe use of already dated slang. I think the scenes in question aren't too grating so it didn't take me out, but still. I almost wish this started as a period piece set in the 90s or even earlier. That could have also opened up the door for time travel into the "future" (aka our present day).

-I have thoughts about some performances but I think I'll keep those to myself. I'll just say, some people definitely tried harder than others.

[mask131]

Why the Time Bandits remake makes me feel an angry despair (2)

I will, to relieve my burning soul, do a brief breakdown of the trailer and point out the exact problems I have with this remake. Let us begin with the handling of the main villain. "Pure Evil" (which is the name they chose in the remake for Evil / The Evil Genius - and I do regret they did not kept the Evil Genius naming because it was such a clever pun, as he was indeed a carcature of the mad scientist while also being a "genius" in the Latin sense of the term, an embodiment, a personification of the concept of evil, the spirit of evil).

Sigh... And they turned him into your random Devil-stand-in, living in an offbrand Hell and who is just adorned with jeweled bones. Even his minions have just the "classical demons" look.

How much of a poor, broken imagination is that? Who had the idea of taking the clever design of the original villains and turn it into just "random Christian hell"?

Yes the original movie had a God and Devil in it... But the marvel of the original was that God and the Devil were areligious, or non-religious if you prefer. No religious imagery whatsoever, the characters are referred to as "The Supreme Being" and "The Evil Genius". Why? Because Time Bandits never was about religion!

Time Bandits is literaly about imagination and the opening of the mind to the wonders of the world, versus the down-to-earth, mindless materialism that leads to things such as all-consuming technology and the destruction of the environment. LITERALY. This is why The Evil Genus, his lair, and his minions look like this:

Young Kevin lives in a world of consumerism. He is surrounded by parents who only care about buying new cooking items and fashionable machinery - only for all of it to be faulty or not working, and constantly needing buying or repair. By following the Bandits into the world of history that he uses, in his own life, as a form of escapism from the dumbness and idiocy of his parents' universe, he is escaping these dreadful and broken modern times by returning to the "old times" before all of this - Ancient Greece, the Middle-Ages, the Napoleonian Times... Only to be LITERALY hunted down by the embodiment of everything evil with consumerism and of technology gone wrong.

The Evil Genius IS a mad scientist and insane inventor whose magic relies on creepy machines and strange technologies. His own supernatural powers manifest in such a way that he looks like an occult robot or an esoteric automaton. He doesn't just shoot lightning out of his fingers - they literaly open up to throw tiny missiles. The dialogue and worldbuilding makes it VERY clear: one of the reasons the Evil Genius despises the Supreme Being is because during the early days of Creation he focused on things like butterflies and slugs, while the Evil Genius would have started with "lasers and digital clocks". The department the Time Bandits came from was literaly the one in charge of trees, shrubs and the like. God is nature, the Devil here is an insane, lifeless technology and mindless science which very obviously is a sterile environment in ALL the senses of the word (The Evil Genius is stuck in a barren wasteland, he keeps destroying everything around him without re-creating anything, and when he finally talks of his grand plans for the world it is just... switching things around. Turning seas into desert, and mountains into rivers, etc, etc, and just swapping everything, showing how sterile of an imagination he has).

In fact, the entire reason he wants the map is to gain knowledge of modern technology, because he is convinced that with the knowledge of things such as computers and micro-chips he will take over the world. Which was already hilarious back then, the way he spoke about the cutting-edge technology as somehow being more important than stuff like how the suns and galaxies work ; and is even more hilarious today because of how precisely outdated it all is today.

Speaking of outdated things, this is literaly part of the charm of this movie, which DOES age better precisely because of its "old-timey" feeling. I mean, consider again the design and the character of the Evil Genius:

Only a few words to say: "Vintage/retro H. R. Giger". How cool is this? The Evil Genius design was literaly parodying AND paying homage to the Giger way of mixing organism and technology in a creepy way, and this paid of MARVELOUSLY during the final battle, as the Evil Genius unleashed all the horror of his technology body:

The Evil Genius design and concept is one of the ultimate takes on the "technological evil in a fantasy world" concept. (And the following movie in the "Imagination trilogy", Brazil, LITERALY depicts a world where the Evil Genius won). But now, in the remake we have...

Random skull demon guy? Cheap Sauron? Generic fantasy evil overlord? Come on!

This also makes me worry about something... Is the remake going to remove all traces of ambiguity?

One of the powers of the original movie was that it relied on the ambiguity on whether all of this was real or not precisely by using the imagery of the Evil Genius' domain as paralleling Kevin's home-life.

Why are the minions of the Evil Genius all wrapped in plastic? Because Kevin's parents wrap all their furniture in plastic.

And the ambiguity literaly EXPLODED in the final scene where the Evil Genius and Kevin are face to face, because we literaly see that the Fortress of Ultimate Evil has GIANT STONE LEGOS in it, foreshadowing that Kevin will wake up in his Lego-filled room.

How are they going to explain that in the remake, with Pure Evil's minions being classical demons and his domain being a sort of gigantic volcano? Is Kevin going to check out medieval hellish imagery? Are his parents going to be fervent Christians? I... I literaly don't know.

[I know that the ambiguity is dissolved in the very end and it is all real anyway, but that was still part of the marvelous process of the movie. You start out "Oh it is all real fantasy okay", but then as you go along you pick up the clues and you go "Oh wait, it IS in his mind, that's his mindscape, okay" only for the last minutes to seemingly confirm it is all a dream... before showing you it was not! And so you go "Wait, it was REAL? WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS?". The movie has you start out accepting in a normal way that it is all real, but by the end, when it tells you the exact same thing, you are completely baffled by the revelation.]

You have this clever take on what a villain in a kid's own fantasy/imagination might be, the embodiment of everything that opposes and crushes Kevin's own imagination (technology, consumerism, his own parents - it is no wonder the Evil Genius disguises himself as Kevin's parents mixed with their favorite TV show precisely to trick the Bandits into giving him the map). This DOES reflect how this great fantasy adventure is ABOUT Kevin first and foremost.

Versus... Random God vs Devil Christian battle I guess?

[lady-of-the-spirit]

Kevin Haddock 🤝 Lucy Preston: knowing everything about history somehow