Millennium |
  • USA / Canada • 1989 • 108m •   • Directed by: Michael Anderson. • Starring: Kris Kristofferson, Cheryl Ladd, Daniel J. Travanti, Robert Joy, Lloyd Bochner, Brent Carver, David McIlwraith, Maury Chaykin, Al Waxman, Lawrence Dane, Thomas Hauff, Peter Dvorsky, Raymond O'Neill. • Music by: Eric Robertson.      Bill Smith, chief investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), has been assigned to determine whether human error is the cause of an airline crash. He and his team of investigators are very confused by the words on the cockpit voice recorder by the crew relating to the crash. But at the same time, a theoretical physicist named Dr. Arnold Mayer has a real professional curiosity about the crash, which borders on science fiction. While giving a university lecture, he talks about time travel and the possibility of visitors from the future. Smith discovers the involvement of an organization of time travellers from a future Earth irreparably polluted who seek to rejuvenate mankind from those about to perish in the past.
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SPOILER Just explaining the story is in itself a spoiler. Ladd's the head a crack team of female time travelers who pose as flight attendants on doomed flights in the past in order to abduct the passengers before the crashes. The future is a bleak, dying place. The human race is sterile and disintegrating from a harsh, polluted environment. Time travel is a dangerous business, and not just for the travelers. Any unguarded act can result in time paradoxes, which are felt as severe tremors in the future. Too large a paradox, and the entire human race of the future will be destroyed. Naturally, potential disaster occurs, when a device used to stun passengers before their abduction is accidentally left on two separate flights, one in 1963, the other in 1989. What is mind numbingly illogical is why the travelers did not return BEFORE the devices fell "into the wrong hands" and retrieve them? Instead, Ladd returns to the past in a failed attempt to seduce FAA investigator Kris Kristofferson and prevent him from discovering the device. The final stupidity occurs when Robert Joy tells Ladd she will have Kristofferson's child, after she has made it clear she is sterile. What follows is a pompous "Criswell-like" voice over that "this is not the end...this is the end of the beginning." Ed Wood couldn't have expressed it better.
Too bad, because there are several fine performances in "Millenium," including Joy, Kristofferson and several of the supporting players. Ladd does her best (which is pretty good), but is ultimately defeated by an underwritten, paradoxical characterization.
Production values are alternately handsome and cheesy. I'm not sure anything would have saved the script, but four or five more rewrites certainly would have helped.
Review by Bob-45 from the Internet Movie Database.
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