50 Essential Sci-Fi Films of the 21st Century (So Far)

What do you do when you’ve got one crap TV miniseries and a whole lotta lockdown time to play with? If you’re director-animator Aristotelis Maragkos, you make The Timekeepers of Eternity.

Sculpted from the charred remains of Tom Holland’s middling 1995 miniseries The Langoliers (itself based on Stephen King’s novella), Timekeepers boards us on a red-eye flight from LA to Boston, on which most of the passengers and crew suddenly go missing. Timekeepers’ rag-tag band of survivors land the plane and go out in search of answers, while battling the strange and obsessive Mr. Toomy (Bronson Pinchot), who is determined to get to his meeting on time.

Reworked in a grainy, Xerox, black and white style, Maragkos takes one small but significant element from the original series - that antagonist Mr. Toomy obsessively tears strips of paper to remain in control of his invisible childhood monsters - and runs with it.

Paper animations dominate the film, tearing, crumpling, and adding new details. Maragkos' editing and animation provide fresh meaning to scenes, remixing characters' actions and expressions, breaking through into surreal sequences that reflect their inner turmoil and conflicts, and intercutting footage from elsewhere (past, present, and new renderings) to expand and create alternative meanings from the original material. And there really isn’t another film like it, sci-fi or otherwise.