8.5 / 10
Time Bandits is one of the strangest mainstream time travel films ever made. Seen it twice across decades. The 8.5 rating is what it earns. Terry Gilliam directing his second solo feature after Jabberwocky (1977). Co-written with Michael Palin. Six little people stealing a map of the universe from God himself. Sean Connery as Agamemnon. John Cleese as Robin Hood. Ian Holm as Napoleon. David Warner as Evil. Ralph Richardson as the Supreme Being. A boy named Kevin tagging along through the holes in creation. Released by HandMade Films, George Harrison’s production company.
The Setup
Kevin (Craig Warnock) is an English schoolboy whose parents care more about new appliances than they do about him. He sleeps with a flashlight and a head full of history books. One night an armored knight rides out of his closet, looks around briefly, and rides back through where the closet wall should be. The next night six little men named Randall, Fidgit, Strutter, Og, Wally, and Vermin burst through the wall pursued by a giant glowing head.
The little men are former employees of the Supreme Being. They worked on the project of creating the universe. They quit, stole the map He used to design it, and have been using the map to rob people across history. The map shows the holes in time and space. The Supreme Being wants the map back. The six little men want to keep robbing.
Kevin gets swept along. They travel through the Napoleonic Wars, Sherwood Forest, ancient Greece, the Titanic, and the Time of Legends. Each stop produces a comic set piece. Each stop also positions them closer to the lair of Evil, who wants the map to remake creation into something more to his taste. The film documents the journey, the encounters with history’s celebrities, and the eventual collision between the Supreme Being and Evil at the center of everything.
The Gilliam Vision
Terry Gilliam came to Time Bandits as one of the six members of Monty Python. He had been doing the animation work on Python projects and had directed Jabberwocky as a solo project. Time Bandits was the film where his visual sensibility separated from the wider Python comedy. The film is funny, but it’s funny in a different way than Python films were funny. The humor is closer to fairy tale than to sketch comedy.
The film established the visual style Gilliam would develop across Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), and 12 Monkeys (1995). Practical sets with extreme depth. Costumes that look hand-made. Forced perspective compositions. Characters dwarfed by the architecture around them. The look is recognizably his own. Other filmmakers have copied parts of it. None have managed all of it.
Gilliam co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Palin. The collaboration produced a script that’s both children’s adventure and as adult metaphysical commentary. Children can watch Time Bandits and follow the story as a series of fun episodes. Adults can watch the same film and notice the questions it’s asking about creation, free will, and the nature of evil. The dual tone is the film’s signature achievement.
For Writers
Time Bandits shows how to write fantasy that works on two levels for two audiences at once. The film doesn’t condescend to children. The film also doesn’t exclude them. The adventure works as adventure. The metaphysical content works as metaphysical content. Neither audience gets a watered-down version of the story. The lesson for writers is that you don’t have to choose between accessible and real. If your work makes sense as story to a child and also is meaning to an adult, both audiences are served.
The trick is that the surface story has to be complete on its own. You can’t rely on the adult reading to hold up the children’s reading. Time Bandits gets this right by committing fully to the adventure first.
The Star Cast
Sean Connery as Agamemnon is one of the film’s signature performances. Connery plays the Greek king as a man of natural dignity who takes a strange child into his court because the strange child has just rescued him from a Minotaur. The scenes between Connery and Craig Warnock work because Connery commits to treating the child as a person instead of as a plot device. Kevin’s eventual loss of Agamemnon (when the little men steal him back into time) is the film’s first real emotional cost.
John Cleese as Robin Hood plays the role as a polite English aristocrat handing out alms to the destitute. He shakes their hands warmly. He greets them as if they were guests at a garden party. Cleese understood that the joke was the gap between Robin Hood’s reputation and his actual conduct. The character is trying to do good. He’s also condescending in ways he can’t see. The performance is funnier than a more conventional Robin Hood take would have been.
Ian Holm as Napoleon plays the emperor as obsessed with the height of his entertainers. Napoleon’s puppet show falls flat because the puppets are too tall. The little men become his court because they’re short. The bit is about Napoleon’s actual historical anxiety about his height. Holm plays it with full commitment. The character is petulant and dangerous and ridiculous at the same time.
Ralph Richardson as the Supreme Being is one of the film’s most surprising choices. Richardson plays God as a slightly fussy English gentleman. He’s precise. He’s faintly bureaucratic. He talks about evil as a routine management problem instead of as a cosmic crisis. The performance is one of the strangest depictions of divinity in cinema. It works because Richardson doesn’t try to make God impressive. God is just a person who happens to have made the universe.
The David Warner Performance
David Warner as Evil is the film’s central antagonist and its most underappreciated performance. Evil lives in the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness at the edge of creation. He’s been imprisoned there by the Supreme Being. He wants the map of the universe so he can remake creation. His specific complaint is that the Supreme Being created insects and trees and other natural phenomena instead of computers and lasers and modern technology.
Warner plays Evil with intellectual contempt instead of theatrical menace. Evil is smarter than everyone around him. He explains his plans to his henchmen in detail because he enjoys hearing himself explain them. He kills minions casually when they fail him. The performance suggests a man who has been alone with his grievances for so long that he’s forgotten how to interact with anyone who’s not either his servant or his target.
Warner went on to a long character actor career. The Omen (1976), Tron (1982), Star Trek VI (1991), Titanic (1997), and many other productions. His Time Bandits performance was the highest profile leading-villain role of his career. He died in 2022 at age eighty. The Evil performance is one of the things to remember him for.
The Children’s Adventure
The film is a children’s adventure on its surface. Kevin is approximately ten years old. He gets to meet his historical heroes. He gets to travel with a band of outlaws. He gets to participate in saving the universe. The structure is recognizable from every children’s adventure story of the previous century.
The execution is what separates Time Bandits from generic children’s adventures. The film doesn’t protect Kevin from the darkness around him. He sees people die. He participates in a battle. He watches his historical heroes turn out to be flawed in ways the history books didn’t warn him about. The film treats him as someone capable of absorbing complexity instead of as someone who needs the complexity filtered out.
The Agamemnon sequence is the cleanest demonstration of this approach. Kevin has been adopted by Agamemnon as a son. He’s gained a father figure who pays attention to him. The little men steal him back from this happiness because they need him for the next robbery. The film doesn’t soften the loss. Kevin grieves visibly. The grief is one of the film’s emotional engines. The audience feels it because the film respects the grief enough to let it land.
For Writers
Time Bandits respects its child protagonist by letting him experience real loss. Kevin doesn’t get a sanitized version of history. He doesn’t get a sanitized version of his relationship with Agamemnon. The losses he experiences are presented as actual losses instead of as setups for resolution. The lesson for writers is that children’s fiction is more powerful when it acknowledges cost. If your child protagonist never loses anything that matters, your child protagonist isn’t learning anything.
If your child protagonist loses things and has to find a way to carry the losses, you’ve given the child reader or viewer a model for the actual experience of growing up. Time Bandits is one of the strongest examples in modern cinema.
The Ending
The little men, Kevin, and the Supreme Being arrive at the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness for the final confrontation with Evil. The Supreme Being defeats Evil by making him explode into fragments. The Supreme Being instructs his employees to gather every piece of Evil because each piece could rebuild itself into the whole. The little men are sent off to perform this task. Kevin is sent home.
Kevin wakes up in his bedroom. The room is on fire. His parents come in to rescue him. The fire was caused by a smoldering Polaroid in his toaster oven. The Polaroid shows the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. The firemen pull a smoking lump out of the toaster oven. The lump is a piece of Evil. Kevin’s parents touch the piece despite his warnings. They both explode into nothingness.
Kevin is left alone in the street with a firefighter who turns out to be Agamemnon. The closing image is Kevin and Agamemnon together, the firefighter giving Kevin a nod and walking away. The ending is the film’s most controversial moment. Children’s films don’t typically end with the protagonist’s parents being killed and the protagonist being abandoned. Time Bandits ends exactly that way. The choice is consistent with the film’s commitment to not protecting Kevin from consequences. The parents were neglectful. The parents touched Evil despite being warned.
The parents got what people get when they touch Evil.
Craft: A Strange And Lasting Achievement
Craft Note
Time Bandits is one of the strangest mainstream films ever made. The Gilliam direction integrates fantasy production design with metaphysical content. The Palin-Gilliam screenplay works on two levels for two audiences. The Connery, Cleese, Holm, Warner, and Richardson performances all commit to material that less ambitious productions would have played safer. The HandMade Films production allowed Gilliam the latitude he couldn’t have obtained at a major studio.
The film became a foundation for Gilliam’s later career. Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), 12 Monkeys (1995), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and others built on the visual and thematic vocabulary Time Bandits established. Gilliam has had a difficult career marked by production failures and studio interference. Time Bandits remains one of his cleanest successes.
The 8.5 rating is what it earns. The film doesn’t reach 9 because the pacing in the middle act has some slow stretches and the children’s-adventure layer occasionally overshadows the metaphysical content the adult audience came for. The film is essential cinema either way. It belongs in any conversation about fantasy filmmaking that works outside conventional genre constraints.
Is Time Bandits worth watching?
An 8.5. Time Bandits is one of the strangest mainstream time travel films ever made. Terry Gilliam directing. Sean Connery, John Cleese, Ian Holm, David Warner, Ralph Richardson. Six little men stealing a map of the universe from God. A children’s adventure that respects its protagonist enough to let him experience real loss. The film belongs in any fantasy cinema conversation.
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