Oct 041989
 
two reels

Bill Smith (Kris Kristofferson), an airplane crash investigator, is perplexed to find Nobel Prize winning scientist Arnold Mayer (Daniel J. Travanti) at a recent crash site, as well as several anomalies in the wreckage. He also meets Louise Baltimore (Cheryl Ladd), an attractive, but bizarre flight attendant. What he doesn’t know is that Louise is a time traveler, part of a team that takes people off of planes before they crash, and she needs to recover two lost weapons before temporal paradoxes destroy the future.

It is odd to find a movie that is smart and moronic at the same time, but that is the art of Millennium. It doesn’t blend them to form some mediocre middle ground, but has the good and the bad sitting with each other, confounding the viewer who is seeking to have some kind of coherent opinion of the film.

Based on a short story by acclaimed science fiction author John Varley, who turned his screenplay into novel while waiting for it to be produced, the basic idea is imaginative and filled with potential. The human race of 3000 AD is dying. Due to the destruction of the environment, the gene pool has been hopelessly corrupted. But they do have time travel. With it, they have the opportunity to bring people from the past forward and perhaps save the species. Unfortunately, it is extremely dangerous, as any alteration in history could destroy everything.

Long before Quentin Tarantino popularized out-of-sequence storytelling, Millennium showed us events twice, first from Bill’s point of view, and then from Louise’s, where her timeline doesn’t line up with his. Although the mystery is obvious early on, there’s a good deal of suspense while we are seeing things only as Bill does. Once we’re following Louise, the pictures turns into an involving action romp.

While using some clever story-telling techniques, Millennium also falls into expository hell. Instead of letting the viewer learn things as part of the action, two characters, the scientist and a glib robot in the future, just rattle off story points, scientific explanations, and whatever else Varley wants known. When those two aren’t doing it, future agents are explaining the rules of time travel to each other as if no one had ever mentioned them before.

Since this is a movie for main-stream consumption, there has to be a romance, no matter how unlikely and unpleasant to watch it might be, and they don’t get more improbable and distasteful than a furry and constipated Kris Kristofferson and a beautiful but frigid Cheryl Ladd. Attraction? These two should be poking each other with sharp sticks. The characters together makes even less sense than the actors. He’s grouchy and distracted to her, and she appears psychotic to him (though much of that is the fish-out-of-water aspect). Sure, it’s easy to see why he wants to sleep with her (Ladd is quite a babe, and was one of Charlie’s Angels for those of you too young to remember…anything), but after sex he should be looking for ice picks under the bed. When they start proclaiming their undying love, I was wondering if I’d dropped off and missed thirty minutes of emotional development.

While plot turns are occasionally difficult to fathom (if you are trying to avoid time paradoxes, would you put your time vortex where you can be seen popping in from nowhere, and if you think there are time travelers, but have no proof, would you rant about it to the government?), the movie moves fast enough that you’re on to something new before you’ve realized how dumb that last scene was. The special effects are nothing to brag about, but are serviceable. The robot design doesn’t stand up so well and was outdated by 1950s low-budget standards. And the set of the future Earth could have used a lot more money (it’s very claustrophobic in the future). But all the myriad minor failings could be ignored if Ladd’s acting fit her character and Kristofferson’s acting existed. Even if she’s not believable, Ladd can get by on her figure and smile. But Kristofferson brings nothing to the table. Perhaps he was hung over during filming or had been prescribed some narcotic pain pills.

Millennium is one of those “almost” films. Recast Bill, have the director spend substantial time working with Ladd, and axe the love story, and you’ve got a nice if unimportant picture. Almost.

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