Time Bandits
July 13, 1981 in theaters
Young history buff Kevin can scarcely believe it when six dwarfs emerge from his closet one night. Former employees of the Supreme Being, they've purloined a map charting all of the holes in the fabric of time and are using it to steal treasures from different historical eras. Taking Kevin with them, they variously drop in on Napoleon, Robin Hood and King Agamemnon before the Supreme Being catches up with them.
Cast
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TRAILER
QUOTE
"God isn't interested in technology."
DID YOU KNOW?
Terry Gilliam wrote the film specifically as a reaction to what he called the 'Disney-fication' of children's entertainment -- he wanted to make a fantasy film with genuine darkness and a moral that children could actually engage with.
THE VERDICT
Synthesized from published reviews
Terry Gilliam's most accessible film and one of the great children's movies that is emphatically not for children -- a time-traveling heist adventure that uses its premise to deliver a genuinely bleak worldview about evil, indifference, and the cruelty built into the structure of the universe. The all-star cast includes Sean Connery, John Cleese as Robin Hood, and Ralph Richardson as God, and every single one of them plays it completely straight. The ending is uncompromising and exactly right.
GALLERY
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