Sat 30 Jan 2016
A Science Fiction Movie Review: MILLENNIUM (1989).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , SF & Fantasy films[9] Comments
MILLENNIUM. 20th Century Fox, 1989. Kris Kristofferson, Cheryl Ladd, Daniel J. Travanti, Robert Joy, Lloyd Bochner. Screenwriter: John Varley, based on his short story “Air Raid.” Director: Michael Anderson.
I wish I could say that I have read the story this movie was based on, but although I read a lot of John Varley’s work, “Air Raid” isn’t one of them. Varley is a very good science fiction writer, and no matter how much I’d like to say that this is a very good science fiction movie, I hate to tell you that I just can’t do it.
What’s worse, I can see that this could have been a very good movie, but while it has its fans, I don’t think it did very well overall, critically or financially.
What Millennium is is a time-travel movie, and while the “Back to the Future” series of movies show that time-travel movies can be done so that they make sense, even to a general audience, they have to be gosh darn hard to pull off, never once allowing the viewer to become confused along the way. The premise in this movie is this: Sometime in the future of our planet, life has become so bleak that they send commando squads back the present to kidnap airline passengers who about to die in an accidental crash, replace them with identical dead bodies and bring them back to the future to send them off to colonize other planets to maintain human civilization.
The idea being that this is a way to not disrupt the true flow of time, since people about to die would not be missed, causing a different change of events to occur, rather than the present one. As anyone who has read time-travel stories knows full well, changing things in the past can seriously change things in the future.
Kris Kristofferson plays Bill Smith, a head NTSB investigator in charge of looking into one such crash, during which he accidentally meets Cheryl Ladd, leader of a commando crew such as described above, the second time for her, the first time for him. Can one chance encounter such as this, under the strangest conditions, lead to romance? Of course it can.
The idea of time-travel paradoxes is well explained — for example, what would happen if you went into the past and killed your grandfather before you were born? — but even the best attempts to present the same on the screen can easily go awry.
It may have helped if they had asked me — should I go back in the past and offer my services? — but when scenes shifted in this movie, a caption of what time and year it was would have helped. I had to back up once to start over again myself to make sure when it was that what on the screen was happening. Luckily with modern technology (a DVD player, not a time machine) I could do that easily.
If the presentation hadn’t been so confusing, this would have been a very enjoyable movie, with one more caveat: If you watch this movie and start to get worried about timequakes, with a paradox caused in the past rippling its way through to the present, shaking the furniture around like an earthquake was happening, you needn’t. You’d never know.
January 30th, 2016 at 10:43 am
Was just rereading Algis Budrys’s review of the novel Varrly wrote from one of the umpteen drafts of the screenplay he was tasked with writing…this slight and unimpressive film interrupted his literary career for some years–and between not really liking the original short story that much…it was the second Varley story in the first issue of ISAAC ASMIOV’S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, so was published as by “Herb Boehm” (Herbert is Varley’s actual first name), and was included in his mostly brilliant first collection, THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION…and not caring much for the film, I’ve never read the novel version, though I have a SFBC edition of it around somewhere.
January 30th, 2016 at 10:46 am
Varrly is the Riot Grrl Varley.
January 30th, 2016 at 11:29 am
Steve, It’s “our” planet, not “out” planet in the third paragraph. R is right next to T on the keyboard so that explains the typo.
January 30th, 2016 at 1:41 pm
Randy
I haven’t been having a very good week, have I? One more typo to fix. Thanks!
January 30th, 2016 at 5:14 pm
This one almost works. Kristofferson doesn’t really help for me since I have a theory any movie he is alive at the end of sucks (and several he isn’t).
Not an actor I care for.
Nor does it help that once we know what Ladd is doing the whole movie stops. From then on we don’t care all that much since the mystery is solved and the romance between Kris and Cheryl not really worth the popcorn investment.
In this case it isn’t just that the book/story is better, it’s that it holds up to the end thanks to Varley’s writing skills where the film runs out of gas and into problems at the point we and the hero know what is going on. The screenplay and I seemed to run out of interest in the characters and what happens to them at the same time.
And it hurts too that watching it now we know that no physicist worth his salt buys into the butterfly effect, pointing out the Universe will not allow for a paradox and the only timeline you can change is your own (it’s complex and has to do with the multiverse theory). If you go back and kill Hitler you only create an alternate universe for yourself where Hitler died, the rest of the world continues in the one where he lived and did all the harm.
You can’t blame the film for the science changing though — well, you can, but it isn’t fair — even to a film with Kris Kristofferson in it.
But this one nearly worked, which is more than can be said for many SF films of that general era.
January 31st, 2016 at 10:21 pm
“Sometime in the future of our planet, life has become so bleak that they send commando squads back the present to kidnap airline passengers who about to die in an accidental crash, replace them with identical dead bodies and bring them back to the future to send them off to colonize other planets to maintain human civilization.
” The idea being that this is a way to not disrupt the true flow of time, since people about to die would not be missed, causing a different change of events to occur, rather than the present one. ”
Bonkers ideas even for an SF film by the sound of it – why not just send the commando squads off to colonize other planets to maintain human civilization? And if things are as bad as they say, why not just cause a different change of events to occur, rather than the present one on the grounds it couldn’t make things worse?
January 31st, 2016 at 11:30 pm
To answer the first of your questions, Jim, if I remember correctly, the people of the future were in such bad shape they were not able to reproduce.
As for the other, why not change the past so the future where they live is not in the horrible shape it’s in, it would most probably wipe them all out with everything else.
Off the top of my head, these are the best answers I have. I’d have the watch the movie again to see if they actually hold up!
February 16th, 2016 at 2:02 pm
Correct…the future commandoes are genetically degraded and falling apart…and they weren’t hoping to change the past too obviously, though the lack of pleasantry in their present might have made such tinkering tempting.
August 31st, 2022 at 2:04 am
I think that making science fiction films in itself is hard.
The Original Star Wars Trilogy, The Star Trek Films; 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6, 2001 Space Odyssey plus Alien, Escape From New York, The Road Warrior, Outland, Blade Runner, Tron, The Thing, The Terminator, Starman, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Back to the Future, Brazil, Aliens, The Fly, Predator, Robocop, The Abyss, T2, Twelve Monkeys, Contact and The Matrix are the exception rather than norm.
Although I might have missed to name other great SciFi Films in that list, generally speaking great science fiction films are far and few in-between.
I think some of our most current great Science Fiction Films today (Distric 9, Moon, I Am Legend, Mad Max Fury Road) owe much not only to those great Science Fiction Films from the 50s to the 90s but also from those that failed but still made us wonder.
Those films we might laugh at today, did their best they could with the money, resources and technology available at their time.
So why not rather than mock them, enjoy the beauty of the attempt, embrace the possibility.