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.