The Langoliers ---- ** (out of 5) (1995)
Cast: Patricia Wettig, Dean Stockwell, David Morse, Mark Lindsay Chapman, Frankie Faison
Director(s): Tom Holland
Screenwriter(s): Tom Holland
Released on: May 14, 1995
Reviewed on: September 8, 2002
Rated: PG-13 - for violence and some sci-fi terror
Some Stephen King novels were just not meant to be movies.
An airplane flight carrying many passengers accidentally slips into a rip in time and it travels back to the past. However, this causes all the passengers that were awake at the time to disappear into thin air. Only 10 people (including one of the co-pilots) manage to survive because they were sleeping when the plane passed through the time rip. They begin to panic when they awake so they land the plane and find themselves at a familiar airport that is completely deserted. One man in their group gives them a vague theory of the goings-on. As a child, his father tormented him and forced him to get straight A's in school. To make him do this, he told him a legend about these creatures called the Langoliers that eat up lazy people. This causes the man to slip into madness and become hellbent on reaching his destination, due to his father poisoning his mind as a boy. Another man in the group, a mystery writer, changes this theory into a more elaborate one. The Langoliers clean up all the problems in the past and future by eating it all up and keeping it untouched by people from the present in cases of time travelers arriving. Now they must find a way to go back to the present before the Langoliers eat them up.
If you plan on watching this movie, keep this in mind. This three-hour science fiction flick is very slow moving. The time travel theory is quite clever though. King writes that, if you traveled into the past or future, there would be nothing there. And, when you think about it, this could very well be true. The reason for the past being that everything that happened, has happened and it can't be changed by time travelers. The reason for the future being that things from the present will lead up to the outcome in the future. This movie basically provides us with one complicated time travel theory after another. There are very few exciting moments and a lot of time is taken up by everyone walking around in the deserted world or talking in the plane, trying to figure everything out. My question is: How can this be considered movie material? The book had much depth and was very well-written, but for a book to be converted over to celluloid is just too much. Anyway, to the point... The premise of it all will surely attract curious viewers and keep you interested for a while but, once the credits roll, you will find yourself unsatisfied and feeling as if you wasted three hours of your life.
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