Time
VINCENT: I could scarce restrain the rushing of my feet! These 12 long years have been like chains abound me!
PANSY: Oh...oh, and the personal problem?
VINCENT: Oh, much, much better.
Personal problems aside, Vincent is expressing one of the film's big themes: time is a prison, and the map provides an escape. Imagine if he could have gone back 12 years to be with his love.
KEVIN: Do you know where we are?
RANDALL: Of course I do...1796, Battle of Castiglione. See?
STRUTTER: Are you sure we're not in somebody's bedroom?
This is one of the points when a specific time is treated as a specific place, a destination instead of a state of being. Heavy. Question: is time a location? Better hit up some relativity theory to get the 411 on that.
RANDALL: You see, to be quite frank, the fabric of the universe is far from perfect. It was a bit of a botched job. We only had seven days to make it.
Even God has to bow to time, it seems. The creation of the universe itself was apparently a rush job. Well, that explains a lot, actually.
KEVIN: I'll never get the chance to meet Robin Hood again.
Here is Kevin being all wise and insightful again. Even with the ability to travel through time, you have to take advantage of your opportunities because they may never come around again.
AGAMEMNON: Remind the queen that I still rule this city.
This is a subtle reminder that the clock is ticking for everyone...and Agamemnon may not have nearly as much time as he thinks he does.
KEVIN: The Time of Legends! There's no such thing.
RANDALL: But there is. You just gotta believe in it.
The Time of Legends is apparently somewhere unmoored from the rest of the timeline. It's a place where anything can happen...and again it emphasizes that time is really presented as a series of places.
RANDALL: How could I know we were gonna run slap-bang into an iceberg? It didn't say "get off before the iceberg" on the ticket.
Randall is making excuses here. You have a map that lets you travel through time, dude. And even if you didn't, it's the Titanic. Read a book sometime, Randall.
EVIL: I have the map! I have the map! And the day after tomorrow, the world!
Interesting that even with the map—which renders time infinite—Evil still has to wait until "the day after tomorrow" to begin his evil plan. This is a good time to note that in this movie, it's not how much time you have but what you do with it that counts.
RANDALL: We just found the biggest hole in the universe, and it's practically below our feet!
That hole really does open up the cosmos since our heroes can—and do—go anywhere in their quest to stop Evil from remaking the universe.
KEVIN: Mom? Dad?
Kevin has been returned to his time, without the map...and yet with his parents gone, all kinds of possibilities open up for him. Time, it seems, can give gifts even if you don't have a map full of shortcuts.
