User Reviews

Fun, but not particularly good. Even so, I would have enjoyed a few more episodes to see if it would pan out at all. A big nit is this: They allegedly needed Doug Phillips for his expertise of a WWII battle. Problem is, he remembers it not as it was supposed to happen, so how much of an asset is he? He doesn't know how it's supposed to go. And given that, he should have been aware of the effect of the plague, since he is part of the altered timeline. Not quite sure why he still has a wife and two kids, but perhaps that would have been explained later.

Best part was the laughs I got from the Hogan's Heroes references.

After reading some previous accolades of this show, I went looking for it and was able to watch it online. I was thoroughly disappointed. The only thing this has in common with the 1960's TV series is the name it took from it as well as the names of the two lead characters, but it ends there. Even Tony Newman from the original is now Toni Newman a female, and Doug Phillips superior in the military, rather than a civilian colleague. In the original TV show the Time Tunnel was built on purpose and was a top-secret government project into time travel. Not so in this incarnation. Here the Time Tunnel is created accidentally. An experiment of the Department of Energy in hot fusion to produce clean energy creates a time storm. A sort of time warp. Only the personnel in the Department of energy laboratory know the true story and now they need to fix points in the history that have been altered, changing the current timeline. They now must go back in a limited amount of time and correct these changes. The series comes off more as a combination of Star Gate SG1 and Quantum Leap, than the 1960's Time Tunnel series. This is not a reboot by any means except for the purloined title and appropriation of a couple of character names. As a huge fam of the original series, I came here expecting the old show with updated computers, but this is not that. This is a different show entirely and should change its title and distance itself from the original. I would still love to see a reboot made based 100% off the original TV show. I would not watch this version again.

**MINOR SPOILERS**

I finally managed to get hold of this movie and watched it last night.

When I'd finished, I just could not believe that the networks failed to pick this up and commission a series.

But then again, considering all the sub-standard, mindless s**t that not only gets commissioned but keeps returning season after season ad nauseum - thereby speaking volumes about the collective lack of taste of TV execs and great swathes of the viewing masses at large - maybe it's not such a shock that this excellent remake (perhaps "reimagining" would be a better description) of the classic '60s show was shelved. Some things never change even after 4 decades (case in point: the original "Time Tunnel" was axed after a 30-episode single season, while the camp, puerile drivel that was "Lost In Space" ran to over 80 episodes across 3 seasons). These people wouldn't recognise quality television if it came up behind them and bit them in the backside.

But rant over! Back to the film itself. In the present day (2002), a secret offshoot of the U.S. Department of Energy has built an experimental Time Tunnel, but their meddling with time has created a "time storm" that's somehow rippled across history and caused subtle changes to the present (for example the U.S. now only has 49 states, and the New York Yankees baseball team have become the Boston Yankees). Only the team in the Time Tunnel complex have somehow been shielded from these changes, so only they can remember how things used to / "should" be. To prevent the changes becoming more serious, a team is dispatched back to the Battle of the Huertgen Forest on the border between Germany and Belgium in late 1944 to try and put things right. Disguised as a team of American GIs from that period, their mission is to find a man from the sixteenth century that the time storm has somehow picked up and dumped in 1944 (although exactly how and why this happened is never really explained), as it is believed that his displacement in time is somehow the catalyst for the unwanted changes to history.

I thought that this whole film was very nicely done. There are some cool state-of-the-art special effects and the Time Tunnel itself looks pretty awesome. The 1944 battlefield backdrop to the action, along with the uniforms of the German and U.S. troops, are also very realistic, and the combat scenes looked like something straight out of "Band Of Brothers" or "Saving Private Ryan": Very impressively crafted indeed.

There are one or two nice tributes to the original Time Tunnel series also: One of the central characters is again called Doug Phillips - although perhaps in a nod to 21st century political correctness, the original series' Tony Newman has now become "Toni Newman", one of two no-nonsense female members of the time-travel team. When Doug is initially brought into the complex, it's explained that the team would be "going into freefall" down into the main complex in some futuristic elevator (exactly as happened in the pilot of the original 1960s series) and the idea of the Time Tunnel accidentally lifting a person out of one past era and dumping him in another to cause mayhem there came straight from the original series episode "The Death Merchant" - then it was Machiavelli, this time round a young Medieval monk.

One way in which this version of "Time Tunnel" differs though is that while in the original series it was explained that history only happens once and cannot be altered - thereby essentially rendering the time travellers mere spectators to historic events - this time around we're told that history is fluid and CAN be changed, so the time travellers need to take great care not to upset the temporal applecart - definite shades of "Timecop" here. Also, while the original 1960s time travellers were lost in the temporal vortex and could only be bounced around from one era to another by the boffins back in the lab, here the team at the complex can bring the time travellers back with no problem.

The version of the film that I watched clocked in at 52 minutes. But according to this page on IMDb, it's 120 minutes long. This makes me wonder whether there are in fact two versions floating around out there??

But whether it's 52 minutes or 120 minutes - I would strongly recommend that anyone who enjoys a good time travel story or is a fan of the original "Time Tunnel" series should pull out all the stops to try and get hold of this film. It really is a must-see. And it's nothing short of a crime against the sci-fi viewing public that this excellent pilot was never followed up and made into a full-blown series.

The original "Time Tunnel" series was one of Irwin Allen's less successful efforts. It lasted but a single season (although it was a 30 episode season, long in those days and impossible today) and wasn't widely syndicated in afterschool reruns like Lost in Space or Voyage to the Bottom of the sea. Which was just as well, because it became very formulaic even in that single season. Our dashing heroes (always with impeccable hair) land in a strange time, get into conflict with the denizens of the era (or, in the later episodes, often invaders from space), have a fistfight or two and save the day, then are tossed into next week's episode.

This new pilot was perhaps a mish-mash of other series thrown together, but by and large, it worked. Mostly, it was due to the two lead actors playing Doug and Toni. Flynn was a little too gung ho and two-dimensional. JD was a stereotypical CIA agent with ice water in her veins and the medic was little more than strongman Willie Armitage from "Mission: Impossible." He did have potential as a character, though.

Unlike the series, there was no ultra-secret, ultra-expensive, ultra-gigantic, ultra-everything government time travel project. It was simply a nuclear fusion experiment gone awry, creating the timestorm that is the source of their problems and allowing the time travel that makes their missions possible. The term "the 240," indicating the 4 hours they spent stabilizing their end of the timestorm, didn't really work. It's hard to believe it took exactly 240 minutes to do that. It might have been better to call that "T-zero," for the point from which everything else is measured.

The new Time Tunnel is more impressive than the set from the series, which is to be expected given the march of, uh, time. Actually, the set from the original pilot was also fairly impressive, with additional windows overlooking the large control room, although it was simplified in the course of the series. The new Mission Control is similar to that, with the control room looking down at the tunnel through a shielded window, shades of Stargate SG-1. The CGI tunnel was certainly better than the forced perspective model where actors could only run 15 feet up the tunnel, seemingly growing as the tunnel narrowed too quickly.

This remake takes some cues from "Search" aka Probe (1972), a cult series where agents from a secret agency are assigned to search for lost or stolen items. In both, the agents carry equipment that let support personnel at headquarters see and hear everything they do, as well as being able to hear advice from HQ. The implant that could monitor what they see is highly implausible, but certainly better than the God's eye view they would see suspended in mid-air in the tunnel in the original series. It is also similar to Allen's "The Time Travelers" (1976), his own failed attempt at a revival. Unlike the series, where Doug and Tony are haplessly bounced through time, they have nearly full control of the time travel aspect here and in Travelers, having the ability to return to the present at will. In fact, it's very close to Timecop, the short-lived 1997 series on ABC. The premise is almost identical. Agents are sent back in time to correct ripples in history, then return to headquarters when history is restored.

Irwin Allen did not place much importance on character development. Throughout the entire run of the original show, we learned almost nothing about the backgrounds of Doug and Tony, other than Tony's father dying at Pearl Harbor. Allen liked to cut to the chase, so ten minutes into the show, Tony Newman had recklessly propelled himself into the past (with no clear reason to, I might add). This pilot spent quite a bit more time fleshing out Doug and Toni, so we can safely assume that they were meant to be the main characters again had the series been bought. The other characters are very sketchily drawn. Whether they would have even remained had the series started is anyone's guess.

Alas, time travel science fiction doesn't have a very large audience and the show wasn't ordered. Timecop was the last such failure. The most successful of recent efforts was the ridiculous "Time Trax." (Also ridiculously named. A real-life example of the line from Stargate SG-1's "Wormhole X-Treme" self-parody, "Research says that shows with X in the name get higher ratings.") At the very least, this pilot should have been aired even if the show was never picked up. The production was already paid for, so why not send it over to the Sci-Fi Channel and recoup some of the expenses? It was certainly better than pilots like "Island City" or "Star Command," neither of which were picked up but which did both air on Fox. Time was, decades ago, when unsold pilots were burned off in the summertime, but today's hypercompetitive TV market has no use for anything that doesn't look like a smash hit. We lose decent TV like this because of that mindset.