You know what type of blockbuster we don’t have enough of these days? Time travel movies! There have been some — Looper, Source Code, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Predestination, Edge of Tomorrow (sort of) — but not enough to call it a fully-functioning genre. Perhaps this will get the ball moving again: As per EW, Apple has green-lit a TV reboot of the relentlessly goofy and, in its final moments, traumatically dark 1981 romp Time Bandits.
Now, that might sound like sacrilege, akin to remaking Back to the Future (a thing that likely won’t be happening any time soon). The original Time Bandits is the most accessible, most pleasurable thing animator-director Terry Gilliam has ever done outside of the Monty Python camp — not as brilliant or deeply felt as Brazil or 12 Monkeys or even The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but him playing nice turns out to be charming indeed. (Then again, we have yet to see Gilliam’s forthcoming latest picture, the long-promised The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.)
Here’s the good news: The person tasked with turning Time Bandits into a TV show is no less than Taika Waititi, the co-creator of What We Do in the Shadows and director of the weirdest MCU outing out there, Thor: Ragnarok. He’s no Terry Gilliam, but he has his own distinct comedic sensibility, which should, ideally, ensure that Time Bandits 2.0 is similar but different, and therefore well worth the reboot.
The original Time Bandits finds a young, bored English boy (Craig Warnock) lighting off with a gang of dwarf thieves who travel through time stealing priceless objects. Pitstops included a mix of real historical figures (Napoleon, Agamemnon) and those of questionable historicity (Robin Hood, an ogre at the employ of the recently late Katherine Helmond). As a TV show, of course, Waititi can really let his imagination run wild. Maybe he can even lure supporting player Sean Connery out of retirement for a cameo, if only so his last screen performance isn’t the film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
(Via EW)
