Reviewers, it seems, have gotten used to the idea that movies made from Michael Crichton’s novels are doomed to be second-rate (unless Steven Spielberg injects a bit of his magic into them, of course). We can look back at “The 13th Warrior” (from “Eaters of the Dead”), “Congo”, “Sphere”, even the very first in the series, “The Andromeda Strain”, and see that Crichton is a man who takes an interesting idea, implements it in a moderately pedestrian way for a book, and then promotes the book into an eminently forgettable movie — “a pleasant science-fictional diversion”, one might say. (“Jurassic Park”, both book and movie, stands out as an exception; perhaps giving Spielberg credit for the success of the film is not totally fair, since I read the book three years earlier and found it fascinating.)

“Timeline”, unlike “Jurassic Park”, is not an exception, although I think that those reviewers who give it a “D” or “Bomb” rating are probably just venting their general dislike for anything they don’t understand. I’d have given the film a “C” or maybe a “B-“.

Plot: a high-tech company, planning to put the USPS, UPS and FedEx out of business by introducing teleportation (“faxing” objects from one place to another), inadvertently opens a wormhole, with fixed termini, to the region of a great battle in 14th century France. Various people are sent back into the past, for reasons not made totally clear, and eventually the help of a professor of archaeology excavating the battle site is requested. The professor is sent back but does not return, and his son and a group of other students go after him, where, naturally, they are caught up in the events leading up to the battle.

The characters are eminently forgettable, with the possible exception of student Andre Marek (Gerard Butler). Interesting questions are addressed, but never resolved (is it possible to change the past? who knows? it looks, at one point, as though it might happen, but doesn’t. what causes the occasional, but cumulatively significant, defects, both macroscopic and microscopic, in the bodies of those who go through the wormhole? who knows? it doesn’t matter.) Why, I might add, do all 14th century Frenchmen in the movie speak 20th century French? Beats the heck out of me. Why, in the year of Chirac’s opposition to the Iraq war and Blair’s support of it, are the French in this film the good guys and the English the bad guys? I suppose because Crichton wrote the book sometime before last spring … (*)

Another “interesting diversion” film, not exceptionally bad, certainly not exceptionally good. It will be interesting to see what Crichton will convince the movie industry to do with “Prey” …

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(*) Nothing to do with the movie, but I find it amusing to see how so many people seem to believe that, because we found France to be a convenient place to march through on our way to Germany sixty years ago, a whole new generation of Frenchmen should be willing to unquestioningly obey any advice or desires we express to them, out of simple gratitude for something most of them have only read about in the history books …