The Timekeepers of Eternity (Movie Review)

To put it mildly, Stephen King’s The Langoliers miniseries is one of, if not the, worst King adaptations made to date. It was mired by stilted, uninspired performances and embarrassing CGI that’s aged far worse than you might expect - which is saying a lot when it comes to low grade mid-90s properties. Plus it clocks in 3 hours total across two separate hour and a half episodes, making the viewing experience a monumental chore. Greek filmmaker Aristotelis Maragkos’ The Time Keepers of Eternity cannot fix the bland performances that are forever etched in our brains, but it takes a remarkably innovative approach to condensing the bloated adaptation down to the most effective narrative points. As such, this is an endlessly intriguing piece of artistic experimentation that, from here on out, should be the only way anyone is ever exposed to The Langoliers.

For those blissfully unaware, The Langoliers first aired in May of 1995. The adaptation of the King novella was written and directed by Tom Holland and starred David Morse, Bronson Pinchot, Patricia Wettig, Dean Stockwell, Mark Lindsay Chapman, amongst others. It followed a collection of people who fell asleep on a flight to Boston and awoke to find most of the passengers and crew had disappeared with these unlucky passengers left behind to try to make sense of what happened.

One of the standout things about The Langoliers was the unhinged and unintentionally hilarious performance from Pinchot as Craig Toomey--but Maragkos saw beyond the schlock and tapped into the hidden potential of Toomey's unhinged but tragic unraveling. In the miniseries Toomey is often seen staring off and moaning while slowly ripping off strips of paper. And so Maragkos’ re-imagining of the miniseries focuses this experiment on the fractured state of Toomey’s mind, and actually presents it in a much more palatable way. This labor of love features meticulously animated photocopies of black and white frames from the original series cleverly edited down to a tight runtime of just over an hour. In the process Maragkos adds in various paper animation techniques such as crumpling and tearing to depict and accentuate character's actions and states of mind. What’s more, the titular CGI abominations called the Langoliers are re-imagined as what appear to be animated floating grinders (made out of paper), tearing apart the images on screen in similar fashion to Toomey’s soothing nervous habit.

Toomey is a character who is rapidly going insane in anticipation of his investors meeting where he plans to reveal the massive financial mistake he claims to have made intentionally in rebellion against his father who always harshly pushed him toward success. As a child Toomey’s father threatened him with monsters, Langoliers, who fed on lazy people. As an adult faced with this impossible situation he spirals to insanity convinced the Langoliers are coming for him and the rest of them and so we’re treated with scene after scene of Pinchot bizarrely screaming at the rest of the cast to varying degrees of hilarious incompetence. The Timekeepers of Eternity finds greater depth in this central undoing by cutting out all the unnecessary pulp that plagues Holland's adaptation, embracing the over-the-top nature of Pinchot's performance to accentuate the madness rather than punctuate the humor--though make no mistake, it's still pretty funny...it's hard to fully shake that stigma. 

The Timekeepers of Eternity, in addition to being a vastly superior title, improves on The Langoliers in every way it possibly can. Maragkos takes an adaptation that deserves to be left in obscurity and re-imagines it as a paper nightmare that miraculously new life to these animated frames while retaining an old-school, classic vibe. This is experimental filmmaking at its finest and a spark of hope for any older property out there, maligned or otherwise, just waiting for someone to give it a loving tribute that reinvigorates its artistic ideas.

Screened as part of the 2022 Chattanooga Film Festival.

Need more Langoliers content? See the former BGH spin-off show, Behold! An Electric Terror - Episode 36 “The Langoliers”