Terry Gilliam’s 1981 fantasy classic Time Bandits is not officially a Monty Python production, but it involves most of the team, and much of the humour is obviously “Pythonesque”. Monty Python has, in online right spaces, developed a reputation as the quintessential baby boomers, gleefully and ignorantly hacking away at the foundations of Western Civilisation, unknowingly and uncaringly stacking up civilisational losses that would have to be dealt with by generations to come.
In films such as Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen and Time Bandits, Gilliam dials back the more egregious and bawdy traits of the Python team and instead plays with metaphysics, re-enchantment, and fantasy. The banal, tedious realm of the material plane is contrasted with the whimsical, magical, and unbounded potential of imagination. If Monty Python in full detonated the symbols that gave meaning to life, then Terry Gilliam seems, in the 1980s, to be asking, “so now what?”
The protagonist of Time Bandits is an 11-year-old boy named Kevin. He lives in a nondescript suburban sprawl in England. His parents ignore him and prattle about consumer products and how to achieve higher status based on sofas, toasters, and two-speed hedge cutters. Kevin spends his time reading history books and admiring ancient warriors and tales of derring-do. Kevin’s “call to adventure” emerges through his wardrobe in the form of six dwarfs who appear on the run with a map. A terrifying Being of extreme power emerges and chases the company through a portal, and Kevin’s adventure begins in earnest.
It turns out that the dwarfs were the Supreme Being’s assistants and employees, and they had borrowed his map of the cosmos. This map contains the flaws in His creation, such as portals and holes in the fabric of the universe that the company falls through and escapes into. Gilliam does a splendid job of off-loading exposition on the fly, as it were, and uses Kevin’s inquisitive nature as a means by which the dwarfs can be made to explain just what is happening.
The leader of the dwarfs, Randal, wants to use the precious map to travel across time, looting and stealing as he goes to acquire wealth and treasure. Each of the eras the gang arrives in is worthy of commentary.
Napoleonic France
After escaping from Kevin’s bedroom, Kevin and the dwarfs land in Napoleonic France. Napoleon (Ian Holm) is depicted as a tyrant, and mass executions are taking place around his camp at the Battle of Castiglione. Napoleon is obsessed with the height of other great men of history and feels sympathetic toward the gang because they’re all small. During this era, we cut to the main antagonist, Evil ( David Warner), an overly dramatic and pretentious incarnation of Satan, who we shall discuss later.
Napoleon fires his high command and promotes the dwarfs to replace them. This swiftly results in a maudlin Bonaparte drinking himself to sleep, and Randal orders the dwarfs to rob him blind. They then escape through a portal, taking the treasure with them.
Sherwood Forest
The gang falls through a portal centuries earlier in Sherwood Forest, landing on top of Michael Palin, who is hamming it up as a ludicrously effeminate toff wooing a damsel. John Cleese arrives as Robin Hood, who smugly steals the gang’s loot and generally adopts the airs and graces of an elitist conman who despises “the Poor”. Unsurprisingly, the Sherwood Forest section is the most Pythonesque of them all. In this telling, Robin Hood is no better than the bandits who seek to steal for their own gain. The Supreme Being arrives once again, causing the gang to panic. Worse still, two portals open instead of one, and Kevin jumps through one alone.
Thus far, Kevin has met two famous men of history, Napoleon and Robin Hood. Napoleon was an insecure sociopath, and Robin Hood was a grinning swindler.
Mycenaean Greece
Kevin arrives alone in Mycenean Greece, dropping out of the portal just in time to save King Agamemnon (Sean Connery) from defeat at the hands of a minotaur. Agamemnon is wise, brave, and noble and brings Kevin into his house, imparting his wisdom and teaching him life lessons. Despite being a king, Agamemnon places virtue over material wealth and honesty over deceit. For the first time since the film began, Kevin has a heroic archetype and father figure to invest in. He tells Agamemnon he never wants to see his parents again, and the King accepts him as his son and heir.
Unfortunately for Kevin, the dwarfs arrive once more, ruin everything, and rob Agamemnon before abducting Kevin and disappearing through time again.
The Titanic
The gang arrives on the Titanic and swiftly begins enjoying Agamemnon’s loot. Kevin starts to interrogate Randal’s motivation for stealing the map. After all, the Supreme Being’s map offers infinite potential for attaining knowledge and endless possibilities for adventure, but Randal cannot think beyond mere wealth and lucre. By this point in the narrative, Evil has revealed his plans and busied himself, scheming to get the map. Evil thinks that the way the Supreme Being has constructed the world is a farce, that men having nipples is stupid, slugs are pointless, and so many species of butterflies existing is ludicrous. Instead, forms should only exist for their utility, functionality, and efficiency — calculators and computers over poetry and trout wriggling in summer streams.
Evil's scheme is to trick the gang into entering the Time of Legends to attain the “most fabulous object in the world”.
Aboard the Titanic, Randal asks a waiter to fetch him another champagne with “extra ice”.
The Time Of Legends
After the Titanic sinks, the gang enters the mythical Time of Legends, which can only be entered by “believing in it”. They are quickly hauled out of the brine by an ogre with a bad back and brought aboard his ship. Eventually, after taking command and leaving the ogre and his wife bobbing in the sea, the ship is revealed to be on the head of a giant who walks ashore.
After being set down by pumping the giant full of tranquilisers, the gang are ready to find the most fabulous object in the world.
The Most Fabulous Object in the World
The gang’s pursuit of the most fabulous object in the world is, of course, a ruse by Evil to bring them into his clutches, where he can get the map. Or, to put it differently, the pursuit of shallow materialism is leading the company, quite literally, to Evil. Within Evil’s fortress, Kevin is confronted with a warped replica of his parents and their devotion to the mind-rot of dumb quiz shows and the offer of consumerist trinkets. The irony is, for Evil, the most fabulous object in the world is the Supreme Being’s map, which would allow Evil to remake the cosmos in his own horrifying and utilitarian vision.
In the third act of Time Bandits, Gilliam draws together and interweaves the various subtexts and narrative arcs into a single tapestry. The path of the Last Man is to lose sight of the transcendent, to forlornly and obsessively chase after the low, shallow, and material. At the end of that road, metaphysics will be waiting, re-entering as Evil, having been neglected as a higher ideal. It is surprisingly reactionary terrain for a former member of Monty Python to tread. It is, of course, smothered with irony, deconstruction, and bawdy jokes, but as noted above, the question remains, “so now what?”
Within this story, Kevin has, from the outset, represented the frustrated Higher Man cast into hollow postmodernity, yearning for heroes, kings and nobility. The world, as per Max Weber, has become disenchanted. Mechanisation, industrialisation, and rationalisation have scraped modernity clean of mysticism, magic, myth, and meaning. This is the world Kevin was born into and to which he does not truly belong.
Yet, Gilliam’s depiction of the Time of Legends is, besides the creatures, an extraordinarily sterile and barren place. Moreover, Evil, as the ultimate incarnation of that realm in his fortress, talks at great length, lauding the world of Weber’s disenchanted spreadsheet. Indeed, modernity, as depicted at the beginning of Time Bandits, appears every bit as profane as the world Evil wishes to create.
Enter The Supreme Being
The final confrontation with Evil involves Kevin and the dwarfs deploying various military forces from across the ages, from knights to cowboys, archers to tanks, all to no avail. As Evil prepares to kill Kevin and his friends, the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson) calcifies Evil, who then falls apart in a cluster of lava-like rocks. The Supreme Being is an eccentric and mildly cantankerous old man. It is revealed that He orchestrated everything that occurred to test His creation for flaws. Kevin asks the deity why so many people had to die. He replies flippantly, “it’s to do with Free Will or something.” The usual Pythonesque trait of belittling more significant existential questions is on display here. Yet, in a sense, the question of Free Will has been at the core of the entire narrative from the beginning.
Of all the characters in Time Bandits, Kevin has the least agency. After all, he neither chooses to be sent to his bedroom nor dragged along with Randal and the dwarfs, nor does he decide to end up in Evil’s lair. Yet, despite this, he chooses to act heroically and honorably at every turn. Kevin’s life-changing decision is to reject his real parents and select Agamemnon King as his father figure — and even this is snatched away from him.
Conversely, Randal decides to steal the map and travel across history, robbing whenever possible. He also chooses to flee from the Supreme Being whenever he is asked to return the map. Randal was not forced into greedily seeking out the most fabulous object in the world that turned out to be Evil; he did so freely and enthusiastically.
Similarly, Kevin’s parents choose a life of dead-eyed consumerism over affirming life and vitality. In the final scene, they also ignore Kevin’s warnings about the rock of Evil inside their microwave and are blown up as a result. Connery’s reincarnated King Agamemnon saves Kevin from the burning family home; his parents cared more about the household appliances. Kevin may not have Free Will like everyone else, but he does have a purpose.
Here, Evil’s techno-optimist, utilitarian worldview becomes more apparent and less shrouded in fog. Since his introduction and throughout the film, Evil’s diatribes have argued against whimsy, beauty for beauty’s sake, and the wonder of life more generally. Kevin’s parents, as the result of the dehumanising drive of technology and materialism, are interchangeable with Evil’s dimwitted minions. In squeezing out the wonder of life, technology, efficiency and consumerism are paving the road to hell. It is an assault on the design of the Supreme Being. And here’s the kicker: people will freely choose it.
Time Bandits asks big questions but does so in a manner that does not trigger our postmodern cynicism. As Baby Boomers synonymous with casually tossing aside the inheritance of Western civilisation, Monty Python lampooned the big questions rather than confronting them. To ask questions about the meaning of life, God, and the nature of evil, became associated with being pretentious, overly serious, and pompous. We became Kevin’s parents, busying ourselves with inanities to block out viewing life as anything more than an entertainment product. An earnest meditation on profound issues must occur second-hand, with plausible deniability. In this way, a film such as Time Bandits allows the postmodern cynic to engage with Big Questions while always being able to backtrack and claim it is a silly kid’s fantasy film. Terry Gilliam, of course, knew this.
In an age when few have read Gibbon, but everyone has seen Star Wars, pop culture has become a rapidly dwindling mine from which to extract the ore of meaning. We cannot indefinitely delay existential questions. Instead, we decide whether to become Kevin or his parents.
Like Terry Gilliam, it is to ask “so now what?”
Well done! I have recently been thinking of Monty Python, I discovered them when I was about 11 and memorized all the skits like other nerdy aspies of the time. You can’t go home again and I jettisoned the idea of rewatching as “ I don’t find their humor funny anymore”. ( my father in his 70’s used those words when my husband, thinking to please him, put a Three Stooges movie on.) it must be getting old, or in this case, disgusted with the easy breezy destruction of so much that was superior to what we’ve got. WWI may have been a nightmarish disaster resulting in an orgy of destructive condemnation that has lasted for four generations but the mid- Victorians did a lot of good without sawing off the branch on which civilization rested.
I hunt down those few tables that show people born at the end of 1961 as not being boomers at all…it is an ever present shame.
I have never realized that Terry Gilliam was doing a type of penance by trying to highlight the emptiness of disenchantment, the futile and insatiable materialism that is left once you’ve coolly destroyed the sacred cows which were already tottering and sclerotic.
Great review as always! The culture war often plays out as a clash between utilitarian transhumanists and reactionaries with mystical inclinations. While this broadly maps onto the left-right divide, reality is a bit messier.
The left isn’t just Harari-style rationalists—it’s also Hindu hippies, Reiki healers, tarot aunts and self-styled druids. Reenchantment is happening on both sides. San Francisco millennials are knee-deep in spiritualism, divination, even channeling Merlin.
Sooner or later, the secular dam of the tech bros will be flooded by this wave of mysticism. It looks like Terry Gilliam was an early adopter of this shift.
I think the main difference is that we root ourselves in folkish tradition, while they lean toward solitary shamanism. We value kin and loyalty; they favour fluid, self-chosen ties.
In the long run, group cohesion outlasts atomisation—but a synthesis seems inevitable, especially since the new right has its own transhumanist bugmen (Thiel, Elon, etc.)