The Langoliers Should Be The Next Stephen King Reboot
Stephen King's The Langoliers hasn't aged well since its debut in 1995, and it's a prime candidate to be a Stephen King movie from the past up for a reboot. The Langoliers was first published in 1990 as a novella in King's book Four Past Midnight, which also included the novellas Secret Window, Secret Garden, The Library Policeman, and The Sun Dog. Like many Stephen King stories during the '90s, The Langoliers was adapted as a two-part TV mini-series on ABC, and it followed its source material almost perfectly.
Fast-forward to the 21st century, and there's been a major resurgence of Stephen King adaptations on the big and small screens. Several, such as the IT films and The Stand mini-series are reboots of previous King adaptations. Others, like Doctor Sleep, have acted as continuations of older Stephen King movies, The Shining in Doctor Sleep's case. While adaptations of Stephen King novels have always been popular, the current wave suggests The Langoliers' time has come for a modern re-telling.
In fact, The Langoliers would also benefit from a reboot in another way. Due to the limitations in technology at the time, The Langoliers was held back on a technical level from the potency of King's novella. As the Master of Horror, King crafted a very unnerving and creepy story in The Langoliers, along with creating a very tortured villain. With the advance of filmmaking techniques since its first adaptation, particularly with respect to CGI The Langoliers should be the next Stephen King book to be up for the reboot treatment, either in film or mini-series form.
The Langoliers follows a group of ten passengers aboard a Red Eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston who awaken to discover everyone else aboard has vanished. One of the passengers, pilot Brian Engle (David Morse), commandeers the plane and lands the group in Bangor, Maine, only for them to discover that there's no one on the ground either. With the terminal having no electricity and tasteless food, the group also hears an ominous chewing noise in the distance. Author Bob Jenkins (Dean Stockwell) theorizes that the group, having flown through an aurora borealis on the flight, have time-traveled a few minutes into the past to a world that life itself has moved on from. Though admittedly The Langoliers' time-travel rules are ambiguous, this was a great setup for a horror story by King.
Meanwhile, unstable investment banker Craig Toomey (Bronson Pinchot) believes the noise approaching is being made by monstrous creatures known as the Langoliers. Warned by his father as a child that the Langoliers devour lazy time-wasters, Toomey goes insane, also coming to believe that the telepathic blind passenger Dinah Bellman (Kate Maberly) is actually "the head Langolier". The general premise of The Langoliers is a very spine-tingling and suspenseful one, while Craig Toomey is at once both a completely psychotic and very tragic antagonist. With all of that said, time, like the world the ten characters find themselves in, hasn't been kind to The Langoliers.
The Langoliers was made at a time when CGI was still a quite new development in filmmaking. While movies like The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were huge advances in CGI, it was still very hit and miss in the '90s. The Langoliers made heavy use of CGI in telling its story, and sadly virtually none of it has stood the test of time. Even shots of the plane itself in flight look terrible by today's standards, as does the "time-rip" the characters travel through. Still, nothing tops the Langoliers themselves.
Described in the novella as spherical flying creatures with gaping mouths and whirring rows of teeth, there was no way to realize the Langoliers without CGI. Unfortunately, the Langoliers that were created for the mini-series were utterly phony looking and a far cry from the ravenous carnivores King's novella presented them as. Unlike the changes made to The Shining, The Langoliers followed King's story very closely and did a solid job of recreating the genuinely suspenseful atmosphere it created. In the end, the film's bad CGI was what kneecapped the mini-series. For a modern reboot, that wouldn't have to be the case.
Despite the name of the monsters being in the title, The Langoliers relies very little on the creatures themselves. Like all King stories, The Langoliers true power comes from its tension and unseen terror. The eerie sound of Langoliers approaching, likened in the novella to various things like paper being crumbled in a room far away, would be plenty to keep an audience on pins and needles. Still, the arrival of the Langoliers would need CGI more of the IT variety to show them as the terrifying monsters they are. A reboot of The Langoliers would be able to take full advantage of the progress in CGI that's been made since 1995, and the titular monsters wouldn't be the only beneficiaries.
The plane would also surely look much more convincing with a modern CGI makeover. Additionally, the time-rip, as the MacGuffin of the whole story, could be far better rendered, too. King's novella presents the time-rip as a rainbow whirlpool in the sky and is described by Nick Hopewell (Mark Lindsay Chapman) as "the well-spring of life". Flying through is unsurvivable unless one is asleep, but it's a heavenly final sight to behold, Nick seeing "colors no man had ever imagined" while piloting the plane back through as the other passengers sleep. The time-rip would be quite a contrast to the more frightening clown imagery Pennywise embodies in the IT movies. Indeed, bringing the time-rip to life as described in the novella could create one of the most awe-inspiring images in any Stephen King adaptation. Though The Langoliers couldn't pull this off in its '90s TV mini-series with the CGI available at the time, a reboot of The Langoliers would have just the CGI update it would need to do the time-rip justice.
As with any early-to-mid '90s movie utilizing the CGI during its infancy, there's an obvious need to cut The Langoliers some amount of slack. CGI was still very fifty-fifty in terms of quality at the time, so expecting to look back on the CGI of most movies from '90s and see Avatar-worthy CGI is a fallacy. Still, even bearing that in mind, as a very fine-tuned Stephen King horror story, The Langoliers was only able to realize the strengths of the novella so far due to its lackluster CGI. The progress made with motion-capture and photorealistic imagery since changes that completely. A reboot of Stephen King's The Langoliers would be freed from the shackle of dicey CGI, allowing a new take on the novella to show the terror of the titular monsters and their world frozen in time as the story presented them.