Doomsday Reels: Millennium

Millennium (1989)

The Director

Michael Anderson

The Actors

Kris Kristofferson (Bill Smith), Cheryl Ladd (Louise Baltimore), Robert Joy (Sherman), Brent Carver (Coventry), Daniel J. Travanti (Arnold Mayer)

The Trailer

The Cause

Pollution

The Story

" We've talked about quarks and anti-neutrinos. But, what about people? It's quite a step from demonstrating that sub-atomic particles can travel backward through time to saying that people can. What would be the result of people traveling in time? For one thing, paradoxes become possible. Say you build a time machine, go back and murder your father when he was ten years old. That means you were never born. And if you weren't, how did you build the time machine? It's the possibility of paradoxes that make most people rule out time-travel by human beings. Still, why not? If you were careful, you could do it. You would not go back to kill Adolf Hitler, much as you might like to, 'cause it would change history. A time-traveler would have to be careful, but he could do a surprising number of things. He could observe, for one. He could find out once and for all who was on the grassy knoll that day in Dallas. And he will know what we can only guess at... that we are destroying the planet we live on by complacency. He will have to live with our legacy of pollution & acid rain. Our negligence today is producing a world in which our children's children will be barren, and the human race heading towards extinction. He could also take things, providing they wouldn't be missed: a cup of water from the Pacific Ocean, a stone from the Grand Canyon. This may sound pointless, but sometimes very small differences can be crucial. The difference between a dead man and a man who's alive can be very small. What about a man who's about to die... a man no one will ever see alive again? This is the hard part about looking for time travelers: they don't want to be found. You must look for them in places where no one is. Or where there are people no one will ever see alive again." - Dr. Arnold Mayer

The Rundown

I had never heard of Millennium before the Scream Factory blu-ray came out, but by all accounts it's a cult darling with some clout.  Millennium is the story of an airline crash investigator, Bill Smith (Kris Kristofferson) who is looking into a flight recording from a recent crash where it appeared that the passengers on the plane were all already dead before the plane crashed.

Unwittingly, and with the help of a physics professor (Daniel J. Travanti), Bill stumbles onto a conspiracy by time travel from a post-apocalyptic future who are traveling back in time and kidnapping people who are about to die and replacing them with doctored corpses to replenish their population in the future. 

Unfortunately, Bill's poking around creates a time paradox Louise Baltimore (Cheryl Ladd), a citizen of the future world has to go back in time and reverse the damage done to the time stream.  In the process, Bill and Louise fall in love, potentially threatening the future even more.

Millenium is an interesting concept.  The idea of taking doomed people from the present to repopulate the future is a really cool idea for time travel.  Since the people are scheduled to not exist after a static point it makes their disappearance from the time stream irrelevant to the flow of time.  Unfortunately, this isn't really explored in the movie.  All of the displaced 20th century travelers are kept in stasis while the denizens of this apocalyptic future are going around gathering more.

For that matter, one of the most annoying things for me in time travel movies is how half-baked the time travel rules are.  Marty McFly can't stop his parents from meeting because if he did then he would cease to exist and couldn't have possibly gone back to the future to stop their relationship in the first place.  Millenium works on similarly confounding principles, why do paradoxes cause the future to start shaking and exploding?  It should just cause everything to change without anyone noticing.  And I can't stand when time travel movies try to put a time limit on when the travelers can go back to.  You have a time machine, there shouldn't be a limit to where you can go and when, that makes no sense.

I really do have to give a nod to the costume, make-up, and set designers.  The future world is weird and neat looking.  I especially like Sherman, the robot we see in the future scenes as well as the weird parliament of people in tubes who look like Cenobites.  These scenes are visually interesting, which is helpful because this movie is a snoooooore.

Kris Kristofferson the actor is and always has been extremely limited in his range.  Sometimes, like in the Blade trilogy, his slow and stilted line reading really makes that Texas boy charm pop but other times, like in Millennium it makes him sound like an extremely substandard actor.

See, much of Millennium, I would argue most of Millennium, hinges on the romance between Bill Smith and Louise Baltimore.  And the problem is that their onscreen chemistry is barely even existent and I'd argue that what's there is largely due to Cheryl Ladd alone.

So much of this movie is devoted to Bill and Louise's love and it is easily the least interesting thing in the movie.  I wanted to see more of the future, to see what's happening to the displaced passengers and how they're coping with their new lives but the movie is more interested in building a butter sculpture out of this subpar love story.

So, even with the cool idea and the eye-catching future sets this is mostly just a rote story of start-crossed lovers that just happens to involve time travel and exploding airplanes.  If you love this movie then more power to you and I won't say that nobody who reads this would enjoy this movie but if I was making reccomendations to myself I'd say skip it.

The Shill

Millennium is available on Blu-ray with R.O.T.O.R. from Scream Factory.

Next Time on Doomsday Reels

"Potato man loves ketchup man."