| Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann | |
|---|---|
Timerider: The Adventures of Lyle Swann French theatrical poster |
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| 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 Chris Mulkey |
| 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 |
Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, directed by William Dear, is a 1982 time travel-influenced action film starring Fred Ward as Lyle Swann, a cross country dirt bike racer. The movie was written, scored, and produced by Michael Nesmith.
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Lyle Swann (Fred Ward) is a well-known dirt bike racer who is in the desert competing in the Baja 1000, a multiclass vehicle cross-country race. Swann has a reputation for being a great rider but is plagued by technical problems from the high-tech gadgetry he incorporates into his Yamaha XT500 motorcycle thumper. When Swann accidentally goes far off course, he stumbles across a time travel experiment that utilizes "maser velocity acceleration" to send objects (in this case, a simian subject by the name of Ester G) back in time.
Swann rides through the field and gets sent back to November 5, 1877 but rides off moments before the system can return him to the present. Unaware of what has really happened to him, Swann rides off towards what he thinks is civilization. He soon comes across the small California village of San Marcos, but his red suit and dirt bike scare the local Mexicans, who think he is the devil.
Swann meets a beautiful woman, Claire Cygne (Belinda Bauer), and sleeps with her, but she is later kidnapped by a ruthless outlaw, Porter Reese (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 hijinks, while Swann gets help from a posse trying to capture or kill the gang.
In a final showdown, Reese and Swann face each other atop a plateau. Just as a helicopter shows up (sent by the builders of the time travel experiment) to take Swann home, his dirt bike falls off the side of the plateau, distracting Reese, who gets mangled by the helicopter'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-great-grandfather and realizes that he is his own great-great-grandfather.
The off-screen dialogue heard over the opening credits explains the time travel experiment as having the goal of sending a Rhesus monkey to the year 1862 (According to the inscription on the canister containing the monkey, which Swann reads aloud, the experiment begins on November 4, 1982). After Swann stumbles into the experiment, the scientists in charge of the experiment determine that Swann and the monkey were sent to about "1875," then later pinpoint the date as being November 5, 1877. The screenplay's "time travel arrival day" of November 5 had first appeared in 1979's Time After Time; and was also the "time travel arrival day" in a later film, 1985's Back to the Future.
In addition to the grandfather paradox and the predestination paradox presented in the film, the necklace that Claire takes from Lyle presents an ontological paradox (i.e., an object with no creation point and continually in the time-loop), similar to the pocket watch in the 1980 time-travel film Somewhere in Time. These paradoxes were highlighted in the 2004 South Park episode "Goobacks," where various time-traveling techniques in movies are compared. The episode described Timerider's time-travel rules as being "just plain silly."
The film's screenplay was written by Michael Nesmith, who was formerly a member of the band The Monkees. The movie is produced by Zoomo Production, which is a subsidiary of Michael Nesmith's Pacific Arts Corporation. The movie was also released by Pacific Arts Video, another entity of Nesmith, who appears briefly as one of the Baja 1000 officials in the beginning of the film.
Nesmith also produced, wrote, and recorded the Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann soundtrack. Eighteen years after the soundtrack was recorded, it was finally released by Videoranch (the official website and another subsidiary of Nesmith's Pacific Arts).
All music composed by Michael Nesmith.
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "The Baja 1000" | 3:13 |
| 2. | "Lost In the Weeds" | 1:43 |
| 3. | "Somewhere Around 1875" | 1:06 |
| 4. | "Scared to Death" | 0:58 |
| 5. | "Silks and Sixguns" | 0:57 |
| 6. | "Dead Man's Duds" | 1:28 |
| 7. | "Two Swanns at the Pond" | 2:20 |
| 8. | "I Want That Machine" | 0:51 |
| 9. | "Escape to San Marcos" | 2:24 |
| 10. | "Claire's Cabin" | 2:01 |
| 11. | "No Jurisdiction" | 0:54 |
| 12. | "Murder at Swallow's Camp" | 2:17 |
| 13. | "Claire's Rescue" | 1:54 |
| 14. | "Up the Hill to Nowhere" | 3:19 |
| 15. | "Out of Ammo" | 3:08 |
| 16. | "Reprise" | 3:31 |
Two brief scenes were cut from the above theatrical version for the 2001 Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD release:
As of April 2011, the original theatrical version is currently available as a rental from Netflix. Both versions cite a 93-minute running time.
Upon its theatrical release, Vincent Canby of The New York Times commented, "Timerider is about a motorcyle rider who, in the course of a desert race, gets mixed up with a time machine and finds himself in Mexico in 1875. It was directed by William Dear and written by him and Michael Nesmith, a former Monkee, who also wrote the film's music and is its executive producer. At the point at which I walked out, about 55 minutes into the story, there hadn't been a single characterization, situation, line of dialogue, camera angle or joke to indicate that anyone connected with Timerider had the remotest idea of what he was doing."[1]
Contemporary critics reviewed the film upon its 2001 DVD release:
Patrick Naugle of DVD Verdict said, "Timerider starts off a bit slow. It seems as if the first twenty minutes are taken up watching Swann ride his bike all over the dry desert plains. After that sluggish beginning, Timerider kicks into a funny and enjoyable fish-out-of-water story."[2]
J.C. Maçek III of WorldsGreatestCritic.com wrote, "Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann was great fun to watch when I was ten years old or so... and, to be fair, it's a good bit of fun to this day. However, as an adult the film all-too-often comes off as silly and indulgent."[3]
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