For some reason I haven’t quite figured out, I tend to do a lot of catching up on graphic novels during the holidays. Between the end of November and the end of January, I read 23 graphic novels. And this year I leaned into the weirder side of the comic medium with books like The Metabarons, American Flagg!, Rebelde, and Space Riders. It wasn’t long before that weirdness bled over into my TV and movie watching.
Enter Time Masters.
By chance, several of the comics I read over the holidays were either associated with Heavy Metal (aka Métal Hurlant) or inspired by the French anthology magazine. And the more I became aware of those associations, the more interested in them I became. My dad had stacks and stacks of Heavy Metal lying around the house when I was a kid, but I was generally discouraged from picking them up because of the mature content (cartoon tits!). By the time I was old enough to read them, I had no interest in them.
Where was I going with this?
Oh, right. Time Masters is an animated film co-written and designed by one of Heavy Metal’s co-creators, Mœbius (aka Jean Giraud).
I can’t remember how I found Time Masters, but as soon as I saw the poster I was sold. So I hit play, ready to be lost in a zany, silly space fantasy.
I’m just gonna cut straight to the blatantly obvious puns here: This movie should have been called “Time Wasters”, because it is really boring, man.
Now I do like some slow-paced films. Some would even say a few of my favorite films are boring. But Time Masters makes even the most lethargic of my favorite films look like fucking thrillers by comparison.
The movie starts off fine. A bizarre-looking car is speeding across the surface of a strange planet before it crashes into some weird rock formations. Inside the cockpit are a man and a small boy, a father and his son. The father is pinned in the vehicle but manages to lower the boy to safety before calling someone named Jaffar and pleading with him to come save the boy from some unseen menace.
It’s a great opening, but that’s about the only facet of Time Masters I’m prepared to praise. The rest of the film is a padded out mess of repeating shots of static illustrations, cutesy (annoying) creatures, uneven animation, and enough plot to maybe fill a 15 minute short film.
In case I haven’t made myself clear, what I’m saying is: Time Masters is boooooooooring. So boring! I swear, I actually began thinking about work and chores while I was watching this movie. At one point, my eyes got so heavy that I turned the movie off and didn’t come back to it for three days.
Time Masters comes off like an excuse to throw a bunch of zany 70s sci-fi art concepts at a feature length film – plot and pacing be damned. I wanted Time Masters to be weird and fun – or at least weird and interesting. I wanted it to be one of those classics you stumble upon every now and then and end up loving, grateful that there are still gems out there like it just waiting to be found. I wanted to like it. But, what do the French say?
C’est la vie?