This was the first movie I saw high. I was in college and working on a computer science major. The scene where David Warner says “…and when I understand computers, then I will be a supreme being!” sent me into fits of hysterical laughter.
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“Nipples. For men!?”
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“It’s never done that before!”
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It made its way on one of his albums “Gone Troppo” one year later. The movie was in heavy rotation on HBO in the early 80’s. (How I first saw it) Always stayed to watch the end credits for that song.
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Don’t forget to let them watch Willow
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Fidget!
I don’t suppose that the Supreme Being could … Nah, monkey’s paw and all that.
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I’ve watched Time Bandits dozens of times since I was a kid. Every single time I watch it I notice something new. The most recent things I realized when watching it were that Jim Broadbent played the game show host and Sir Ralph Richardson played the sorcerer in Dragonslayer the same year as he played the Supreme Being in Time Bandits.
Time Bandits was probably the first movie where I gained an appreciation for a director. This and Brazil are two of my all time favorite movies, and I wanted to emulate Terry Gilliam for a long time. I started to become disillusioned with him when I listened to his director’s commentary on Twelve Monkeys, and my image of him has continued to become tarnished over the years as I’ve heard and read more interviews with him. I now think that he’s pretty much an asshole, even though I still love those two films.
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You have to admit, David Warner gets to play some of the best villains.
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David Warner was our greatest treasure. Every day I am sad that he was not my dad.
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To me, Spielberg and Gilliam both had a couple absolute classic films in their early careers, then they went off the rails and I just haven’t loved any of their movies after a certain point. With Spielberg I loved Close Encounters and Raiders, but nothing after those two films connected with me. Even E.T., which came out when I was ten, the same age as Henry Thomas in the movie, just felt false and cloying and smarmy. I still see every Spielberg (and Gilliam) movie and try to watch them with an open mind, but they never really impress me like those early films.
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Just today I was at the grocery store and saw someone in a Harry Tuttle t-shirt. It startled me and made the world a slightly better place.
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Yeah when he decided to out himself as an asshole he really didn’t hold back.
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To be fair, white men are only responsible for 98% of the bad things in the world
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I take back the “was”. Somehow, David Warner is alive?
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You are very correct about the final battle being represented on the floor of the boy’s bedroom with his toys. It does raise the question of whether it was all the kid’s dream. The dream theory is contradicted by the last scene, though, where [SPOILERS] the boy’s parents explode after touching the piece of concentrated evil and Sean Connery is one of the firemen.
There are dozens of things from the kid’s house that show up in the fantasy worlds. My dad pointed out that the minions of Evil were covered in the same clear plastic sheets as the furniture in the kid’s house. After he pointed that out I started noticing how many connections there were between the scenes. Just an amazing amount of detail in the backgrounds of the film that probably 99% of the viewers never noticed.
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Including as part of the most absurdly and gloriously intense three-dramatic-unities stand-off between two Shakespearean titans ever seen in an American network science-fiction show:
Why the past tense? He’s not dead yet (at least, not according to Wikipedia.)
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I refuse to let Gilliam’s sexist comments ruin my enjoyment of this or any of his films.
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The Adventures of Barron Munchausen might be worth a watch for people that liked Time Bandits. It has a similar frenetic pacing and non-linearity, but it doesn’t quite have the underlying heart to it as TB.
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