Michael's Sci-Fi Lase-O-Rama: Millennium (1990, Image Entertainment)

Source: LDDB.com

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In the late afternoon skies over the United States, two commercial jets suffer a mid-air collision due in part to an overworked and momentarily inattentive Air Traffic Controller. Both planes go down in a fiery explosion just a few miles apart from one another. There are no survivors.

Investigating the cause of the crash is William Smith (Kris Kristofferson) of the National Transportation Safety Board. His bosses back in Washington want a simple answer: was the mid-air collision due to mechanical failure, or human error? Smith has long lobbied for the mandatory installation of hardware on commercial flights that would help prevent this sort of mishap, and this crash may give him an excuse to lobby Congress for such a mandate.

While working the case, Smith meets a young airline worker named Louise Baltimore (Cheryl Ladd). He's taken aback by her quirky mannerisms, but after she comes on strong, he finds himself swept into the unexpected relationship. But Baltimore is more than she's letting on. She has a reason for distracting Smith from his investigation. There are anomalies to be found among the wreckage which can't be hand-waved away. Questions that demand answers. But if Smith uncovers the truth, the consequences will be so far-reaching, Smith can't even conceive of the distance...in either space or time.

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Curious to see what critics thought about this 1989 sci-fi film, before I re-watched for the first time in about thirty years, I hit up Rotten Tomatoes. Turns out there wasn't much said about this movie at the time of its release. Probably why there aren't any pull quotes anywhere on the jacket. Even the indefatigable Roger Ebert, who it seems had something to say about virtually everything released in the 80's, gave this one a pass. That surprised me, since Kristofferson was still a big name in Hollywood despite the stunning failure of Heaven's Gate nine years earlier.

That said, one of the scant few recent reviews on RT gave me a hearty laugh. "Under the Rader"'s Austin Trunick wrote:

Millennium plays out much like someone trying to drunkenly explain the plot of a Doctor Who episode they haven't seen in several years.

And really, he's not wrong. The best thing Millennium has going for it is its opening air disaster which, until the one depicted in 2000's Final Destination, was the most stunning plane crash sequence I'd ever seen. After that, the film turns the heat way down and keeps it there for pretty much the remainder of its run time. Kristofferson and Ladd aren't bad actors, and they do the best with the material they're given, but while the plot wants me to take it seriously, I just can't work up the energy to do so. The idea behind Millennium, which was adapted for the screen by John Varley from his own short science fiction story "Air Raid", is intriguing. The execution, on the other hand, hits the ground about as hard as the plane which falls out of the sky.

Part of the reason for this, I imagine, has to do with how long it took the project to take shape. Varley shopped "Air Raid" around Hollywood for a decade starting in 1979, eventually expanding the short story into a full-length novel with the same title as the film. As Varley himself explained in a 1992 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the film went through four different directors and six different script re-writes before Gladden Entertainment and 20th Century Fox finally settled on the version which appeared in theaters. "Each new director," Varley lamented, " had his own ideas, and sometimes you'd gain something from that, but each time something's always lost in the process, so that by the time it went in front of the cameras, a lot of the vision was lost."

What eventually hit the screen still carries the same framework of Varley's reworked novelization from 1983: the remnants of a desiccated and polution-ravaged Earth are using time travel to repopulate the species by snagging people who won't be missed from the past. The movie shows us the story from both Smith and Baltimore's views, switching perspective about halfway through so we can see what Louise was doing while Bill wasn't around. The novel, on the other hand, switches perspectives every chapter, rotating between Smith and Baltimore far more regularly so you don't feel like you're getting info-dumped to death.

In the film, much is made of the fact Louise and her team of female people snatchers are given the best of everything (the best food, the best medicine, etc...) so as to preserve their youthful looks and beauty, allowing them to blend in with the humans of a thousand years earlier. In the novel, Louise is just as scarred and ravaged as the rest of the survivors from her time: she's lost one leg entirely to paraleprosy, and her skin is damaged and cratered from both the disease and the environmental pollution. To blend in, she dons a "skin suit", basically a fake covering which artificially makes her look like a 20th century woman. The suit even comes with its own prosthetic leg attachment, allowing her to walk as normal. In short, she's nowhere close to being even conventionally "attractive" in the future. But, of course, in the movie she's Cheryl Ladd hot 100% of the time. Feh.

While the Millennium film won't win any awards for its storytelling, I have to give props to the special effects department. The cinema of 1989 was still a few years off from anything resembling convincing computer animation, so everything had to be done with practical effects, which gives the plane crash sequence at the start so much of its power. Later effects sequences involving a time gate which grabs an entire Boeing 707 from the 1960s and drags it into the future temporarily so Louise and her snatching team can do their thing are equally great, and I have to give a special shout-out to Robert Joy who endured what had to be hours of daily misery to become Sherman, Louise's personal robotic assistant. His makeup is fantastic, allowing him minor facial emotes which Joy uses so perfectly that he steals every scene he's in.

But beyond the effects, there's just not a lot going on. What's worse, the film replays a good portion of the story to give us a look at events that took place from Baltimore's point of view. These boil down to different camera angles where the same dialog is repeated, but we've seen this already and the repetition doesn't help. The new perspective in these replays offers little in the way of answers to questions, but it is nice when it shows us stuff we didn't see before. The scene where Louise leaves the hotel room via time gate after failing to convince Smith to drop his investigation is the perfect example of this.

In Smith's view, which we saw earlier in the movie, he walks out the door and down the hall a short distance, leaving Louise behind, pouting on the unmade bed. After a few seconds, he changes his mind and turns around to resume the conversation, only to open the door and find Louise gone, with the bed freshly made. This is all done in a single camera take with no cuts or edits, and is a pretty effective sequence.

When we get Louise's perspective, however, we see Smith walk out the door, only for Louise to storm over to her bag, grab her communicator, and tell Sherman to open the time gate. Louise walks through, then we watch as her belongs fly off the furniture to follow her, and the bed is re-made by running a recording of the bed being un-made backwards. Smith then opens the door and walks in. That's cool.

What isn't cool, though, is watching for a second time as Louise brings coffee to the NTSB officers listening to the cockpit recording, or hearing her have the same conversations with Smith that we already sat through. You're allowed to trust the audience to be able to put things together for themselves, but director Michael Anderson seems to have forgotten this since he directed Logan's Run in 1976. Because of this, even though Millennium only runs 108 minutes, it feels much longer than it should be. At least it goes out with a bang, as the set used to depict the grim future is obliterated in a giant explosion at the film's conclusion.

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The LaserDisc release of Millennium is just as disappointing as the film. It's a bare-bones single disc, encoded on both sides in CLV format, lacking even a trailer or any special features at all. There aren't even any Closed Captions, so if you're hard of hearing, good luck with that. The digital surround mix is fine, but the video transfer is only so-so, and is marred even further by being a 1.33:1 pan-and-scan print instead of the 1.85:1 ratio at which it was originally shot. Finally, the LaserDisc release only has the truncated North American ending, where the film ends after the destruction of the time gate and we have no idea where anyone ended up, or even if they survived the trip. The international cut of the film includes a coda sequence which gives a bit more information. Why this was chopped from the US version when scenes from it made their way into the trailer is anybody's guess, but saner heads prevailed and this ending was used for the 1999 DVD edition.

I really can't recommend Millennium to all but the curious. Varley's novel is great, but the ten years and multiple studios, actors, and directors this film went through leave us with a punch-drunk, washed-up, has-been where a champ should be standing. If you want to see the film, stream it on Netflix or pick up the Shout! Factory Blu-Ray release. At least that way you'll get the original aspect ratio and some semblance of an ending.

Two anachronisms out of five.