MILLENNIUM
A film review by Robert Dorsett
Copyright 1989 Robert Dorsett
MILLENNIUM starts with an incredibly fake model of a Boeing 747 skipping the tops of clouds, bumping all over the place. We go to the cockpit, where the crew is drawling ATC clearances, and the captain, for some reason, so senile that he's taking orders from his first officer. Inexplicably, the airplane has a mid-air with a DC-10. On the way down, the flight engineer's sent to the back. He returns as promptly, shouting "The passengers are all dead!" And thus is the crux of the story.
Kris Kristofferson plays the chief investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). You know he knows his stuff: he looks unkempt, walks like he has more aches and pains than James Gardner, and growls out the smallest line. When he smiles, it looks like his face is going to collapse from the effort. Clearly an expert.
As he investigates the crash, he discovers various oddities: watches that run backwards, for example. And a "thing" that manages to stun him.
Spoilers are at the end of this article. The above makes the plot sound pretty interesting, right? *Wrong*. This is a *horrible* movie. The pits. Pure, un- pretentious, regurgitated crap. The acting sucks. The direction sucks. The production values are non-existent. The special effects are laughable. The dialog is lousy, fake, and contrived. Technically, the producers clearly haven't the foggiest idea of how the NTSB works (Kristofferson to press conference: "We'll have our findings for you in a couple of days, just hold your questions"). The thing which eventually gets Kristofferson in hot water with his bosses in Washington is SOP for the "real" NTSB. Cheryl Ladd looks like a high-school girl who's just discovered makeup.
Suffice it to say that this movie isn't worth seeing. Five minutes into it, I seriously debated running out and negotiating a ticket-swap with "The Package." This movie is pure trash. A zero rating (out of four). An utterly forgettable movie, one which I am embarrassed to even admit having spent the time watching. But even worse, since about a quarter of the movie is run *twice*, in the form of an alternative-future flashback. So we get to see the same, horrible acting and implausible situations for *1/2 the running time of the movie*.
In other words, yes, folks, we finally have an SF flick this summer that's worse (*much* *much* worse) than STAR TREK V (makes STV look like Academy Award material, folks).
Spoilers
The whole point about the movie is that there's this sort of commando team from the future that runs about picking passengers off doomed airliners, replacing them with dead bodies. The idea's to "seed" them in the distance past or far-off future. A humanitarian effort, right? Well, why do they even bother? If the passengers are seeded in the far-off future, they're just fucking up someone *else*'s future. And seriously, are airline crashes the most significant tragedy that people 1000 years in the future will be concerned about? This is one hole the movie never overcomes. Nor do they ever explain why life is such hell in the year 3000. Nor how the robot at the end is able to get all misty-eyed and cry. Now how these jokers are capable of producing dead bodies that are *identical* with other people (without ever seeing the subject), yet lack the technology to produce medicine.
I could go on and on about the incredible conceptual problems in this flick, but it's simply not worth it.
Robert Dorsett Internet: mentat@walt.cc.utexas.edu UUCP: ...cs.utexas.edu!walt.cc.utexas.edu!mentat
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