Time Bandits

Part of the special series THE MAGIC OF TERRY GILLIAM.

Young history buff Kevin can hardly believe it when six dwarves come tumbling out of his closet one night. They tell him that they were employees of the Supreme Being, stole a map with time holes from him, and are now using it to travel through time and steal treasures from different historical eras.

They take Kevin with them and meet Napoleon in France, but quickly discover that he is a big rascal. In King Agamemnon, Kevin finds his long-awaited father figure, while his hero Robin Hood turns out to be an oppressor of peasants. When the map falls into the hands of evil incarnate, the dwarves must do everything they can to reclaim it. To do so, they use technologies from all ages - from bows and arrows to tanks and spaceships. But evil is a tougher opponent than expected.

By its own account, Terry Gilliam's fantasy family film TIME BANDITS is the first part of his "trilogy of imagination" about the "madness of our awkward, ordered society and the desire to escape it by any means necessary." In TIME BANDITS Gilliam shows this attempt from the perspective of a child, in BRAZIL (1985) through the eyes of a man in his thirties, and in THE ADVENTURES OF MUNCHAUSEN (1988) from the point of view of an older man.