THE LANGOLIERS



Tired after doing a whole day's workload of household chores, I lay on the couch dead tired. I click open the TV and mindlessly flip through several channels at random as my eyes grew heavy. It wasn't a full minute later when I blinked.


It was not just an ordinary blink mind you. This was the kind of blink that mysteriously has your body rested and your mind wide awake as opposed to the tired wreck you were just a 10th of a second before. Looking at the clock I realized that it was about an hour past the time the blink had occured.


Had I somehow stepped into a time warp which sent me hurtling 45 minutes into the future?


Logic would dictate that I had probably just dozed off but for the life of me it did just seem like shutting my eyes for a nanosecond.



As strange as I felt then, stranger still would be the result of my random channel surfing earlier. It appears that I had stopped at a Science Fiction channel before warping into "la la land" as it was the first thing my eyes laid on when I warped back into the real world.







What was showing was a 1995 TV movie based on a Stephen King short story ("Four Past Midnight"). The title of the movie was "The Langoliers". It's about a commercial airplane with hundreds of people on board going to Boston. As with most Stephen King novels the story had an interesting twist. In mid-flight, all the people disappear except for only 10 people.



What happened to everyone else was a mystery. The 10 remaining could not remember a thing about what had happened except for the fact that they were sleeping at the time the disappearances happened. This they know because it was when they all woke up that they discovered everyone else missing.



It gets a lot weirder when they land on an airport and discover that not only are they the only remaining people on the plane. They are the only remaining people in the planet!



The movie then unravels into a tale of theories about time travel and clever ideas about time paradoxes.



Some of the parts of the movie was a bit cheesy but it was mainly because of the obvious poor quality of the circa 1995 special effects which might have seemed cool at the time but is oh so lame compared to the current standards of special effects today.



All in all a real treasure for science fiction fans and basically just a damn good story from Stephen King, who is without a doubt one of our times greatest story tellers.