Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann

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Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann
Timerider: The Adventures of Lyle Swann French theatrical poster
Directed by	William Dear
Produced by	William Dear
Written by	Michael Nesmith
Starring	Fred Ward Peter Coyote Belinda Bauer Ed Lauter L.Q. Jones Richard Masur
Music by	Michael Nesmith
Cinematography	Larry Pizer
Editing by	R.J. Kizer
Distributed by	Atlas
Release date(s)	11 December 1982 (premiere)
Running time	94 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
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IMDb profile

Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, directed by William Dear, is the 1982 time travel movie starring Fred Ward as Lyle Swann, a cross country dirt bike racer. The film's screenplay and soundtrack was written by Michael Nesmith, who was formerly a member of band The Monkees. He appears briefly as one of the Baja 1000 officials in the beginning of the film.

[edit] Plot

As the film opens, the title character - Lyle Swann - is a well-known dirt bike racer who is in the desert testing a new prototype linkup between his bike and helmet. When Swann accidentally goes miles off course he stumbles across a time travel experiment that utilizes two "cannons" that fire temporal energy to send each other back in time. Swann gets sent back to 1877 but rides off before the time cannons can return him to the future. Unsure of what has happened to him, Swann rides off towards what he thinks is civilization. He soon comes across a small village but his matching red suit and dirt bike scares the local Mexicans who think he is the devil.

Swann meets a beautiful woman, Claire Cygne (portrayed by Belinda Bauer), and sleeps with her, but she is later kidnapped by a ruthless criminal, Porter Reese (portrayed by Peter Coyote) and his gang of rapists, thieves, and murderers. They also manage to capture Lyle Swann's dirt bike, leading to a series of hijinx, while Swann gets help from a posse trying to capture or kill the gang of criminals.

In a final showdown, Reese and Swann face each other atop a plateau. Just as a helicopter sent by the builders of the time machine shows up to take Swann home, his dirt bike falls off the side of the plateau, distracting Reese. He gets mangled by the copter's tail rotor, leaving only a pair of bloody boots behind. Just as the helicopter pulls away, Claire snatches from Swann's neck a pendant handed down from his great-grandfather... and he realizes that he is his own great-grandfather, an example of a predestination paradox. The necklace itself presents an ontological paradox, as it has no creation and is continually in the time-loop.

The original theatrical ending was altered for the 2001 DVD release. Although the original sound effects remain, the "bloody boots" scene was replaced by a shot of Reese cowering on the ground.

[edit] References

Robert A. Heinlein explored a similar temporal paradox -- a time traveling hermaphrodite becomes his own father *and* mother -- in his short story "All You Zombies." In one scene, there's a jukebox playing the song "I'm My Own Grandpa".
Possibly related to this film is the Futurama episode "Roswell That Ends Well", in which Phillip J. Fry goes back in time to become his own grandfather.
In the South Park episode "Goobacks," where various time-travelling techniques in movies are compared, this movie's time-travel rules are described as being "Just plain silly."