Originally airing on ABC in May of 1995, The Langoliers was a two-part television miniseries adapted by Tom Holland, the director of the original Fright Night and Child's Play, from the Stephen King novella of the same name. Concerning an assortment of commercial airline passengers who wake up from their mid-flight nap to discover that they may have passed through a rift in the space-time continuum, it is typical of a certain kind of King media, especially in television, in that it is above all unimaginative and cynical, excruciatingly belabored and absurd in its faithfulness to the original text, and more importantly lacking in any formal sophistication in order to establish a credible atmosphere of suspense and dread.
You do get a couple solid, scene-chewing performances out of it, especially as it concerns some of King's favorite types of stock characters. There is a psychic girl, of course, played by Kate Maberly, but I'm sad to report that she's saddled with some of the clunkiest dialogue in a teleplay filled with clunky dialog, and Holland seems particularly lost in terms of how to write and direct her. Dean Stockwell saunters about ably as a mystery writer (the author's unapologetic self-insert) who exists solely to provide the most plausible avenue for deducing and explaining what is going on with sufficient gravitas. And Bronson Pinchot gets to have the most fun as an already unhinged stockbroker who takes a dive right off the deep end when the group's paranormal predicament conjures up memories of his abusive father threatening him with the specter of the titular boogeymen, "The Langoliers." There is some mild thematic interest here, with two otherwise independent psychological and paranormal phenomenon converging upon one another, the former serving as a veil for the Lovecraftian revelation of the latter. But that's about it. And at three hours plus commercial breaks, The Langoliers drowns any good will in a torrent of overwritten T.V. banality. Like most adaptations of the prodigious fantasy author's work, it isn't fit for much more than the landfill of pop culture history.
Some twenty-five years since its initial broadcast, through, The Langoliers now serves as the basis for The Timekeepers of Eternity, an experimental project created by Greek filmmaker Aristotelis Maragkos.
Primarily a director of commercials, Maragkos has also produced a number of short artistic works since his days at the London Film School that are surprisingly diverse in terms of their subject and formal approach. The Garden of Glass and Steel, for instance, is a fascinating combination of documentary and contemporary science-fiction, visually surveying the Canary Wharf building complex in London, but narrated with excerpts from the works of J.G. Ballard. Beatitudes, on the other hand, seems to take queues from Yorgos Lanthimos, Ruben Östlund, and Roy Andersson in its poetic character study of a retiring doctor both haunted and amused by the ghosts of his past, set against the backdrop of student riots in Athens.
As his first feature-length project, The Timekeepers of Eternity represents yet another dramatic leap in style and form. What Maragkos has done is to edit down Holland's original miniseries to a brisk fantasy yarn running barely an hour, each frame first printed onto black-and-white paper cels, and then meticulously re-animated. As the film progresses, Maragkos takes advantage of the flimsy properties of each cel in order to create unique collages of imagery, animating the crumpling, tearing, and juxtaposition of the paper itself in order to produce a visual narrative that is at once far more dynamic and thematically appropriate to the story, but also serves as a semi-ironic counterpoint to the original film's campy lack of self-awareness.
I say "semi-ironic," because part of what is both most attractive about The Timekeepers of Eternity, and, thus, also inevitably what proves to be its equally underwhelming aspect as a unique artistic experiment, is that there is a clear extent to which that Maragkos's aim is to bring out those qualities that he sees and appreciates in Holland's film, and presumably King's original story, but which are not satisfactorily served by the plodding mediocrity of The Langoliers. The extensive abbreviation of the original text is a blessing unto itself, but the desaturation of color also takes a charitable view of Holland's otherwise banal direction, aesthetically clarifying the work as an obvious nod to, and a modern twist on, the sort of capsule fantasies of The Twilight Zone or, better yet, those classic "B" science-fiction flicks that Universal-International and Columbia Pictures used to bundle together into double-features in the late '50s. It's still certifiable hackwork, but through Maragkos's lens, and with nearly as much distance between the present and the mid-'90s as there was between Holland and King's own nostalgia and the drive-in / late-night local access T.V. of their childhoods, even the hackie bits attain a degree of unrefined purity that, at least in theory, still has the power to channel primal anxieties, fears, and desires in ways that more refined and sophisticated works can not.
Indeed, the most surprising thing about The Timekeepers of Eternity is how much of Maragkos's unique animation is purely functional in nature. Intractably drawn-out scenes of extensive dialog, if they are not shortened or excised altogether, will be animated in such a way that two shots are juxtaposed together, condensing statement and reaction into the same image. The crumpling and tearing of paper proves a particularly effective means of visually reinforcing the descent of Pinchot's character into total madness. When it comes time - spoiler alert - for The Langoliers to make their climactic appearance, Maragkos's practical method proves infinitely more effective than the original production's crude CGI in evoking the cosmic horror of beings that exist beyond time and space, and of the fabric of reality disintegrating around the characters.
The problem is that, insofar as The Timekeepers of Eternity is an objective improvement upon The Langoliers, it also inherits problems endemic to the original production, while mutating those of its own. Maragkos's earnest fascination with, and perhaps his affinity for this artifact of popular culture, is arguably something that can never be consistently imparted upon the spectator. Holland's original miniseries is a long, crude, and unfocused adaptation of one of King's many long, crude, and unfocused stories. Rather than solving any fundamental problems, Maragkos's abridgment of the story ultimately presents us with a shorter work that is still peopled by a bunch of exceptionally uninteresting characters who don't do much but stand around and occupy various spaces. The Timekeepers of Eternity effectively distills and transforms The Langoliers in order to get the most out of its best elements, but it still leaves you with a hollow feeling of lacking any true depth or definition of its own. It even feels somewhat regressive on its own formal and thematic terms. As a nostalgic, postmodern throwback to the unalloyed "B" spectacles of yesteryear, it's got nothing on the original and meticulous homage to Robert Clarke's The Hideous Sun Demon nestled in Todd Haynes's masterful Poison. Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space and Ben Rivers' Terror! have pointed in much more radical and interesting directions in terms of their own collage of found media, but Maragkos is also behind the times as far as his immediate contemporaries. Rodney Ascher's Room 237, for example, has revealed the incredible potential of the use of found media in order to explore specific social crises, rather than just appeasing superficial fondness for trash culture. I'm sure Maragkos broke his back putting this project together, but it appears to me that both the conceptual and sensorial potential of his labors have been neglected. There is in Pinchot's character, for instance, a brilliant possibility in fusing together all of archetypal, nervously self-destructive men haunted by abuse and trauma that appear everywhere in Stephen King's fiction, that could be presented in the style of a single character going through a single schizophrenic narrative.
Then again, one never wants to waste a lot of breath blaming a movie for what it isn't. I must admit to the strange, cathartic effect of The Timekeepers of Eternity, something that Maragkos achieves through another of his beautifully functional choices, which is to change the ending. On the whole, it is a deeply flawed, but worthwhile pop culture experiment, one best viewed in the context, not of an official theater, but one of those multipurpose art spaces, one with a chic name like the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art (PhilaMOCA), which is where I had the pleasure of seeing it. The film is currently being distributed on a festival screening and specialty booking basis only by the American Genre Film Archive, so if you're interested in seeing it, and assuming the licensing requirement for a home video release is not forthcoming, I'd advise my reader to make sure they're up to speed with what's going on at their D.I.Y. locals.
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