Adapted from Michael Crichton's novel and directed by Richard Donner, 'Timeline' sends a team of archaeologists back to fourteenth-century France, where their professor is stranded, using a technology that accidentally opens a portal to the past. Paul Walker and Gerard Butler headline as the group struggles to survive a medieval war and return home. The film flattened Crichton's ideas into a routine adventure and was poorly received, remembered as a middling time-travel misfire.