Accurate, prescient and dispiriting.

Rating: 1/10 (10 January 2001)

If one were feeling charitable, one could call this 'comedy' the nadir of post-modernity, where history is flattened out, where the dead, largely white, largely European-American, largely male Great Figures are made the subject of infantile mockery, taken out of the period in which they dominated and dumped into one where the majority of yokels don't even know their name. It is post-modernity with a moral - you can't simply rearrange history to suit the present, as most of the students in Bill and Ted's school seem to do - the relics wreak suitable havoc on an archetypally inane mall.
Except there is no moral. One jock caps a poisonously conformist paper with the cliche that it's what Lincoln would have wanted. You hope, as with Marshall McLuhan in 'Annie Hall', that the hallowed President steps up and clips the young fascist on the ear, but, oh no, our friends from times past consecrate the idea of history as progress and improvement, and take to the vapid airbrush that is modern America like the proverbial pigs.

And you can see their point - most of these figures lived in times of great historical repression and violence, even if one or two of them (eg Genghis Khan, according to this film, the father of chop-socky) were doing the violent repressing. America may be a dolt's paradise, but you are unlikely to be burnt for hearing voices, shoved into an oven for being the wrong religion, or poisoned for having the wrong ideas. This is America, after all, and Joseph McCarthy, Vietnam and South America are nightmares that never happened. Because post-modernity would have to have been invented for America if it didn't exist: without historical amnesia, it would be forced to live with itself. And so, great classics or periods of history are stripped of politics and social analysis, and turned into neutered love stories. We are all Bill and Ted, we get the culture we deserve.
Ahem. Sorry about that, bit of a rant there, very old-fashioned. I know a lot of normally sensible people have a lot of affection for this film, despite its visual paucity, its negligible script, its gauche 'acting', its hitting on a half-clever idea AND DOING NOTHING WHATSOEVER WITH IT. people dream of meeting all these historical figures and questioning them. it might be okay for our heroes to say 'duh!' and 'So-crates', but did the filmmakers have to join them? Couldn't they find SOMETHING funny, interesting, ironic, subversive for these great people to do, instead of standing around gaping , while Bill and Ted gurn infuratingly with only a thin screen between them and my fist. It goes on for hours. No thanks: we have 'Time Bandits'