Plot
Lyle Swann (Fred Ward) is a well-known dirt bike motorcycle 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 C and J framed XT500 Yamaha. 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, 1875, The scientists soon realize what has happened, but Swann rides off moments before the system can return him to the present. Unaware of what has really happened to him, Swann rides off. While taking a swim break in a local spring, he runs into a gang of outlaws led by Porter Reese (Peter Coyote). Reese becomes obsessed with stealing Swann's "machine", and the outlaws pursue Swann into the small village of San Marcos, but his red suit and dirtbike scare the local Mexicans, who think he is the devil. There, he meets a beautiful woman, Claire Cygne (Belinda Bauer), who gives him a safe place to hide and severely wounds one of Reese's men (Tracey Walter). The village priest (Ed Lauter) compels them to withdraw, but Reese continues to plot the capture of Swann's dirtbike. In the village, Swann is seduced by Claire and sleeps with her, but she is later kidnapped by Reese's gang as revenge for her shooting and wounding one of them. They also manage to capture the dirtbike, leading to a series of hijinks, while Swann gets help from a posse (L. Q. Jones, Chris Mulkey) trying to capture or kill the gang. Swann manages to retrieve his dirtbike and rescue Claire, but the posse's leader is killed, and another is mortally wounded and dies later.
In a final showdown, Reese's band of outlaws faces Swann, the last survivor of the posse, and Claire atop a plateau. When a helicopter shows up (sent by the builders of the time travel experiment) to take Swann home, Reese's men run away in fear, but Reese stays behind and fires at the helicopter, killing one of the pilots. The helicopter begins spinning wildly as the surviving pilot tries to maintain control, knocking the dirtbike off the side of the plateau. Reese gets mangled by the helicopter's tail rotor, leaving only a pair of bloody boots behind. The helicopter manages to land on the plateau and extract Swann. Just as the helicopter pulls away, Claire snatches a pendant from Swann's neck that was handed down from his great-great-grandmother, who had stolen it from his great-great grandfather as a reminder of "one incredible night they had together." Swann realizes that he is his own great-great-grandfather.
Read more about this topic: Timerider: The Adventure Of Lyle Swann
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)