A modest defence of the Langoliers

 

 

Recently I've dived back into Stephen King, both his stories and the many adaptions for film and tv. I've just finished the novella the Langoliers, which has been on my to read list for a good while. As a young kid I remember watching the Langoliers TV miniseries on the Sci-Fi channel. It's quite a long run time for two parts, 90 minutes with advert breaks. It has a bit of a reputation, it's mainly remembered for early 1990s CG special effects, and memes about its dialogue. Not many King fans care for it, and I'd be lying if I claimed it made my top 10, but I do think it has its charms. Having read the novella and re-watched the mini-series which is just on youtube, I find the derision is a bit overcooked. 

It's not without its flaws, the dialogue is indeed very strange, but most of that is from the novella, I was surprised while reading, but the TV show is very close and faithful to the original story, it's easily one of the most faithful to source material adaptions in the Stephen King filmography. Often it's word for word, and that includes Mr Toomey's* infamous "Scaring the little girl? LAY-D"! Tantrum and Nick's bizarre American stereotype of an Englishman. Now, that doesn't entirely absolve Directer and teleplay writer Tom Holland here, you are allowed to make changes, and should do to account for format and other differences. Punching up or reworking the dialogue was an option and while it does have its charms, re-working was probably the way to go. One example of the faithful dialogue that should've been changed or just cut entirely was Dinah the blind girl's line about cereal and milk, "it sounds... a little like rice crispies after you pour in the milk". This is a slight change from the novella, there Dinah still says that, but all the other characters once they hear the sound make different comparisons, radio static, crunching etc, it supposed to reflect each character's experiences and inability to describe accurately an alien sound, which adds to the creepiness and gives a little more depth to each character. The show just cut all but Dinah's which limits the character development and comes across rather silly.

I say it should've been changed or just dropped entirely because it deflates one of the Langoliers key strengths, its sound design. The great strength of the show is that throughout part I and much of Part II, clunky lines aside, it does a lot to convey a sense of wrongness and building tension and dread. The sound design is key to that, muffling echoes when the characters arrive at Bangor airport, and most importantly, the noise of the Langoliers. There's a very low, almost unnoticeable at first background noise, that slowly, very slowly builds in volume and intensity as the threat approaches until as they draw near its impossible to ignore. And it is a strange sound that's hard to identify precisely. This is what hooked me to beg my parents and let me stay up late on two school nights in a row to watch the show. My parents have no interest or love for science fiction, view it with contempt, so to agree to let me stay up and watch it on the family telly that had cable took some doing. I was quite intrigued and wanted to know what had in fact happened, I doubt I'd ever seen a horror story like it, where the threat and hostility came from just how wrong and off the world was.

Unfortunately, its greatest strength is also the show's greatest weakness, it builds and builds and builds upon itself. The mystery of what happened keeps deepening, the Langoliers march from the distance continues, Craig Toomey's trauma and high-stress existence drive him further and further down a violent breakdown, endangering himself and the other passengers. And then finally, in the final third of the second episode, it all comes to a climax that fizzles out. The Langoliers show up and they are terrible indeed, just not in the way they were supposed to be. Even for the 1990s the CG effects are shockingly poor, I had seen Reboot and Insektors and enjoyed both immensely, their early episodes are in another league compared to this. I have seen concept art of what the Langoliers would look like as practical effect models, they look a bit better, but ultimately I think the design is a major limitation, the teeth simply must have looked better if they had gone that route instead, but as cheap and artificial as the CG one's look, they follow King's descriptions in the novella exactly. It's a testament to King's skill that he wrote a story whose pay off is floating meat balls with teeth to eat the world once time passes, and it was published as a serious work of horror laced fiction that takes a philosophical look at our relationship with time as a concept and force, it wasn't until a studio put it on the screen that people finally realized just how naff that is. Again, though, they must've known how silly and stupid that design would look like out of the minds of readers and in reality. I don't know why changes weren't considered. Then again, they might not have been able to come up with a satisfying alternative with the time and resources they had available.

So in summary, while I think the Langoliers time in the sun has passed, I do think it has its merits, and I am a little sad that most people just see the gay stereotype from the Beverly Hills Cop movies** running around an abandoned airport and passed gifs of his lines on social media. His character is one of the better ones in the show, and there is a lot of depth and emotional baggage and turmoil. I would like to recommend anyone curious to track down the novella, it's the first entry in the collection Four Past Midnight, and perhaps give the show a go, just try to go into it with an open mind, you don't watch all of it though, if you don't like Part I, you can stop, it's the strongest part and the best bits of Part II are what's good about Part I.

*I suppose since everyone else who talks about the show does, but Craig Toomey was played by Bronson Pinchot, star of Perfect Strangers. However, I'm not American, and that show wasn't big over here, I'm not even sure if it was ever broadcast, so I didn't recognize him, and I'm only aware of that fact because everyone else who talks about this show bringing it up, often at length.

** Yes, we did get those, including Beverly Hills Cop III, I suspect Bronson Pinchot doesn't have a very good agent, or has an amazing one with a massive grudge against him.