[Event Review] Popcorn Frights Film Festival: The Timekeepers of Eternity (2021)

Popcorn Frights film festival showcased Aristotelis Maragkos’s creative retelling of a familiar story in The Timekeepers of Eternity (2022). Using edited footage from the 1995 Stephen King miniseries The Langoliers, Maragkos narrows the scope of the original story, taking it from a three-hour miniseries to a one-hour film, and turns it into a character study of the loud and selfish Mr. Toomy (Bronson Pinchot). 

The Timekeepers of Eternity will appeal to fans of the original story. If viewers are unfamiliar with The Langoliers, either the miniseries or the book, Timekeepers won’t make much sense. It will still be a beautiful and fascinating feat of filmmaking, but most of the characters and the central conflict of the story are not explained. The original story follows a group of travelers flying to Boston, who fall asleep on the plane and wake up in a world where everyone else is missing. Each character’s personal reason for taking the trip matters in the plot, but in Timekeepers, only Mr. Toomy’s reason is explored. That’s because he’s the only one who guesses what’s happening, and that monsters called the Langoliers are indeed coming for them. 

Toomy tears paper as a self-soothing mechanism when he’s stressed. Timekeepers was filmed by printing frames of the original series in black and white, and using the paper to make an animated film. The paper is torn, crumpled, and folded to enhance the story. It intensifies the stressful moments, giving them more motion than the live-action scenes, and showing the stress of Toomy compared to the other characters. Scenes with Toomy are often multi-layered, showing images of his father yelling at him as a little boy pieced together with him yelling as a grown man. The louder Toomy shouts, the more crumpled his paper becomes, until it rips away. Pieces of Toomy are falling apart as he loses his control throughout the film.

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Viewers familiar with The Langoliers know what to expect at the end, but Timekeepers delivers surprises. The monsters at the end of the original film, rendered in CGI that didn’t look great at the time and definitely doesn't look great now, are represented completely differently in Timekeepers. The creativity of using crumpled paper to represent destruction works beautifully. Fans of The Langoliers should seek out The Timekeepers of Eternity, and those who were not fans of the original may find something to enjoy in this unique retelling of the story.

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