Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: THE TIMEKEEPERS OF ETERNITY [Denver Film Festival 2021- Virtual]
The texture of reinterpretation is an interesting personification though tricky. "The Timekeepers Of Eternity" is an abridged remix in a way of the 1995 TV Miniseries "The Langoliers". While the original likely has a blinding texture of melodrama, the compacting of a multi-night progression into a little more than an hour using a different format where director Aristotelis Maragkos somehow makes the films into a paper collage is inspired and yet uneven. It is animated and yet it is not. It shows the crumpling of lives and of psyches in a way that gives the film a bit of a pressure cooker scenario (which it might not have had before) and takes out the color and the special effects. There is of course a "Twilight Zone" tinge to it and will introduce the Stephen King story to those who had not seen the original. But beyond being an interesting experiment it doesn't add any depth.
What it does do is allow a new method of interpretation where Bronson Pinchot's performance of Toomey becomes a deconstruction of self as the paper cuts literally rip him apart. Granted Pinchot's performance does seem over-the-top still while the rest of the cast resolves into soap opera acting status (save for Dean Stockwell who obviously still was channeling Al from "Quantum Leap"). The reimagining of the Langoliers themselves like the crumpling of papers reflects the actual dialogue of Stockwell. What is interesting is when the life creeps away from some of the characters, the whiteness of paper overcomes the frame as if a higher power was controlling the path of the story. it gives the story a different meaning. At one point, the viewer see the hands of the creator enter the frame when Toomey's final judgment comes. Those 4th wall breaking moments is what makes this new but it is not used often enough. However it is unclear what the exact process was needed to animate the film like this but still it reflects as an interesting exercise. B-
By Tim Wassberg
