Review: Apple TV Plus’s TIME BANDITS Is An Uneven Riff On The Original

Right up front, I’ll be honest. Terry Gilliam’s 1981 fantasy adventure Time Bandits was one of the foundational movies that made me a film fan. I can remember the first time I saw the saw film during its initial theatrical release, sitting there captivated by the weird darkness of the humor and the scope of the story’s imagination. If pressed, I might even say that one of the best vacations of my youth was the week at the Maryland shore a year later where, thanks to constant repeat airings on HBO, I watched the film eight times in seven days. My family was unamused. But I was absorbing the film through my very pores, having it become part of my DNA.

So needless to say, the news that there was going to be a television adaptation of Time Bandits, headed up by Taiki Waititi but crucially without Gilliam’s involvement, was met with more than just a bit of skepticism on my part. Now I have long been a proponent of the idea that a remake of a beloved property in no way diminishes or removes the original from existence. But then again, this was something near and dear to my own heart. I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to watch it, perhaps in the hope that ignorance of its existence would indeed be bliss.

And to this particular eye, which perhaps wants to protect its nostalgic memory, I have to say that the show… is somewhat entertaining at times, actually. But it still has its problems.

The first two episodes of Time Bandits premiers today on Apple TV+. Subsequent episodes will be released two at a time on a weekly basis. Only these first two episodes were made available for review.

The setup for the series follows the same broad strokes as the film. Eleven-year-old, and budding history nerd, Kevin (Kal-El Tuck) discovers that his bedroom contains a portal to other times. He discovers this, of course, when a band of five people crash through his bedroom, on the run from the Supreme Being (Waititi, in a bout of casting that certainly raises an eyebrow) as they have stolen a map to all the space-time holes in the universe. Kevin gets swept up in the bandits’ escape and they decide to keep him around as his knowledge of history outweighs their own. However, even with his help, the group, lead by Lisa Kudrow, aren’t the most experienced of thieves, which lands them into trouble time and again.

Of course the first episodes set up a few things that will most likely be followed up over the course of the remaining eight episodes to air. So how well some of this will play out remains to be determined. But that could be the series’ biggest asset. Rather than rush through a number of short historical set pieces before moving towards the story’s third act action, this ten part season has room to lean into the episodic portion of the original film. This leaves room to build some tension and more fully explore any character arcs as the show moves towards its finale. As to how well Time Bandits will deliver on that will be determined at the end of the season though.

Visually, the show does bring some style of its own. Many of the time travel transitions in these first two episodes have a nice visual flair that separates them from the dark voids that the original Bandits fell through. Our first look at the Supreme Being features an interesting redesign as well. And while it is nice to see that the new show is striking out in their own way visually, the slickness of the new effects does seem to lack the charm of the pre-CGI, handmade effects of the original. (It should be noted that the 1981 film’s budget was roughly $5 million, which is likely a small percentage of what Apple paid for this new show.)

But while the series does a good job updating Gilliam’s film, there are still a few areas where it falls short. As the embodiment of Ultimate Evil, Jemaine Clement does a credible job, but his performance can’t help but pale against David Warner’s original. But then again, Warner was so good at playing iconically delicious evil bad guys, it seems that there is perhaps no one who could fill his shoes in the role. The change to the bandits themselves, making them regular-sized adults instead of little people, undercuts Kevin’s acceptance into the group on a visual level and makes him look like more of a tag-along than a member of the team. And since Gilliam initially cast the original bandits they way he did is because he wanted to see Little People actors to step out from being just child actor stunt doubles  or being unrecognizable as aliens or robots and into the spotlight as leads in a film, the change does feel more than a bit insulting, even if it isn’t meant to be.