4/5

I thought this was really fun. It's sort of like the Holy Grail meets the Princess Bride meets Terry Gilliam's creativity, I enjoyed it a lot. The production design and settings are all pretty fabulous, and all the actors from the elves to David Warner as "Evil" right down to Ian Holm as Napolean are all great.

It's also pretty quoteable:



I also loved the ending here, it's such a WTF, but I laughed.

Fun and inventive and often hilarious. You can tell that Gilliam's just having fun with this, though, and then he buckled down and made Brazil. There's a real sense of childishness and frothiness to the whole thing. I mean, what's it about really? There's some stuff about technology and bureaucracy ruining imagination (themes he expanded upon later on), but this is just a fun adventure flick.

But it does that really well. The Python sense of humour works wonders with history (especially loved John Cleese as Robin Hood), and there's rarely a joke that doesn't work. Still, that long sequence with Agamemnon really drags and feels quite out of place. Connery is pretty wasted in what is, essentially, a straight role with no comedic partner to play off of. And the climax, while fun, is pretty silly.

As far as Gilliam goes, you could certainly do worse, but this is far from the heights of Brazil or Twelve Monkeys, or even Holy Grail. Even so, it's not a throwaway, though it occasionally feels like one.

I love Time Bandits. I saw this as a kid way back when and didn't know what was going on. I liked the travels through time and the story and the dwarves. The final battle was fun too.

7/10 -> B-

I definitely remember this as a better movie. I was a kid when I saw it, but nostalgia didn't help this much. The first half of the film is great. Interesting, funny... I loved the Napoleon and his obsession with height. But from that point the movie was kinda hit and miss. The only thing that was awesome were the star-crossed lovers. HILARIOUS.

The sets are wonderful and it's a shame that these days rarely who uses models - the fortress of evil looks like something that could've easily come from LotR trilogy or any modern fantasy with really good CGI.

The ending was bad though. Like really bad.