Because he wrote a government report on how to handle alien contact, psychologist Norman Johnson is called to the scene when the Navy discovers a 300-year-old crashed space ship on the Pacific floor. But it turns out to be an American space ship, just not from today’s America.

For me, this adaptation of Crichton’s novel was slow and unscary.

Three bland archaeology graduate students, one of whom envisions himself as a knight, are sent back to 14th-century France to rescue their professor. The novel mentions a multiverse model of time-travel, but gives no explication (nor does it enter the plotline); the most interesting characters and developments appear for a few pages and are never again heard of (at least not in this universe).

Michael Crichton’s book, on which this was based, was interminably slow, and so was the movie—and I’m not only talking about the battle scenes in 1357 France. The actual time-travel mechanism is cool, though.