By Can you guys hear that wet, slopping sound? That’s the bottom of the intellectual barrel getting licked clean after a good scraping. Producers Guy Collins and Michael Ryan are currently in talks to develop a reboot of Terry Gilliam’s underrated and underseen Time Bandits. Collins and Ryan want to turn the dark, bizarre story into a family-friendly action movie. For those unfamiliar with the film, Time Bandits is about a group of midgets that steal a map of all of time and space from God. Well, the Supreme Being, but let’s not kid around here. They pick up an adorable, neglected British boy along the way, while an Evil Genius, played with wonderful malevolence by the inimitable David Warner, plots to steal the map and unseat God. It’s on Netflix Instant, and it’s an old favorite of mine.
Collider makes a very strong point here, saying that the franchise will translate well for families, and that’s true. I mean, a kid takes a magical journey through different time periods, meets Robin Hood and Agamemnon, and ultimately defeats evil. Kids love that. However (SPOILER ALERT FOR A THIRTY YEAR OLD MOVIE OH GOD I AM OLD), the film also ends with the kid’s parents exploding after touching a chunk of concentrated evil. Seriously. It ends about thirty seconds after that, with the kid alone and abandoned. Something’s going to get lost in the kiddification of this one.
Although, if this paves the way for a tween-romance version of Brazil, this weirdness will have officially gone full circle into AWESOME again. But I won’t know, because seriously mentioning a remake of Brazil will probably make my brain boil in my skull.
[Via Collider]