Although this is not a Python picture- the great John Cleese is the only other member involved-it abounds with the Python spirit, and especially with the teeming ingenuity found in the animated interludes that Gilliam designed for the TV show. Gilliam wrote Time Bandits with Michael Palin, a fellow veteran of the Monty Python comedy troupe, which ceased its televisual activities in 1974 but regrouped for occasional projects. If he gets hold of their cosmic map showing the holes, it could be curtains for the universe as we know it. They also forgot about Evil, who’s been spying on them from his dismal grotto. supreme, and they’d be in big trouble when he caught up with them.
Then they had a brainstorm: Why mend the holes when they could slip through them-like the one in Kevin’s wardrobe-to any destination where loot might be found? What they forgot to take into account was that the Supreme Being is. Until recently, they were employed by the Supreme Being to fix holes in the space-time continuum. What in the world (or out of it) is going on? With lightning speed, Kevin has traveled from his cozy bedroom to Napoleon’s battlefront headquarters two hundred years ago.
When the dwarfs escape through a wall that turns into a hallway, Kevin tumbles along with them and lands in the same surprising place: Italy in the late eighteenth century, where Napoleon’s army is on a roll. The following night, though, it’s the aforementioned dwarfs who clamber chaotically out of the wardrobe, with the Supreme Being-manifested as a radiant disembodied head- hot on their trail, demanding the return of a stolen map. His reading hints at an active, creative mind, so when a horse-borne medieval knight barges out of his wardrobe and through his room that night, it’s easy to think he’s having a vivid dream. We first meet Kevin reading a book about ancient Greek heroes, while his parents gaze at a blaring telly. The title characters of Time Bandits are six boisterous dwarfs-Randall, Og, Fidgit, Strutter, Wally, and Vermin-and Kevin, an eleven-year-old boy who becomes their sidekick. The ultimate time bandit is Gilliam himself, a guerrilla fantasist raiding the distant past in this film as exuberantly as he raids the not-so-distant past in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), the future in Brazil (1985) and The Zero Theorem (2014), the present in The Fisher King (1991) and Tideland (2005), and the future and the present in Twelve Monkeys (1995). Other characters hail from history and literature-Agamemnon, Napoleon, Robin Hood-or from the realm of pure imagination, like Winston the ogre and his wife. In its refreshing irreverence, however, this 1981 time-travel fantasy gives more time to the Evil Genius, or just Evil, slitheringly played by David Warner, who proves the age-old wisdom that bad guys are way more fun to watch than good guys. the Supreme Being, or just SB, wittily played by Ralph Richardson, that most lordly of actors. And no less a one than God Almighty, a.k.a. But in Terry Gilliam’s first masterpiece, the deus ex machina is, well, an actual deus. If someone made Time Bandits today, it’s a good bet that the deus ex machina that saves the world would be a wizard of the Tolkien or Hogwarts type. NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers.
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