MILLENNIUM
A film review by Dale L. Skran, Jr.
Copyright 1989 Dale L. Skran, Jr.
Not NIGHTFLYERS or NIGHTFALL!
There exist few examples of strong SF stories made into excellent films. Three recent botches come to mind -- DUNE (Frank Herbert), NIGHTFLYERS (George R. R. Martin), and NIGHTFALL (Isaac Asimov) - - all based on stories of the highest caliber, and all seriously flawed on screen. Now comes MILLENNIUM, based on the John Varley story "Air Raid" (Hugo nominated, I believe). This is the only major SF movie I can remember where the script was written by the original author without being re-written by several hacks. And it is a major film, unlike NIGHTFLYERS and NIGHTFALL, both of which starred mostly unknowns running around cardboard sets. Kris Kristofferson plays an air safety investigator who slowly comes to realize that there is something very odd about a plane crash. Cheryl Ladd plays an assault team leader from a distant, terrible future that is slowly dying. To save humanity, Ladd and her associates steal people from the past who are about to die in plane crashes away to a new life in a distant future, one far beyond their own polluted world.
As a time travel story, MILLENNIUM builds on the background provided by the simpler TERMINATOR and BACK TO THE FUTURE, providing the audience an introduction to temporal censorship and time paradoxes. Cheryl Ladd is surprisingly convincing as the woman from a dying world, and Kris is believable as well. The "stewardesses from hell" scenes as Louise and her team infiltrate a doomed 60's era jetliner was the highpoint of the film for me.
I have several complaints, however. At one point, Louise Baltimore (Cheryl Ladd) turns to one of her assault team and explains in true Gernsbackian Lecturese the concept of time censorship. Louise's "personal robot" is simply a man in a tin woodsman suit. The technology of Louise's future world seems more like that that of 100 years in the future than 1000 years in the future, but this could be explained by a nuclear war or other disaster.
While driving to the movie I expressed a hope that the plot and script would be solid even if the FX were not the best. While driving away, I did an about face and claimed that the movie would be substantially improved if an extra million or so had been put into the robot and the final scenes, which looked too much like the destruction of every citadel of evil I've ever seen on film. A final problem was the literary sounding voice-over at the end of the film - it might be a great story ending, but a movie needs a visual ending.
Overall, MILLENNIUM is a strong SF film, an original SF film, and a film that deserves but will probably not get a wide audience. It is a complex story told from various temporal points of view that seemed to leave the audience I was with somewhat baffled. I'd rate it a +2, and with another million or two in FX and the re-shooting of a couple of scenes, it could easily have been a +3 film.
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