Saving the Future from the Past

I’ve been reviewing classic sci-fi films that I’d previously failed to watch, and I’m going to count 1989’s Millennium in that list, even though there are two things that really should disqualify it. The first is that I actually think I saw this film way back in the day when it was running on basic cable. I have vague memories of it and while I don’t think I ever watched the full film while it was playing, there were moments while I was watching the movie recently where I experienced deja vu. I really had to have seen it at one point, I’m sure of that.

And the other reason why this film really should count for my “classic films I missed before” list is because this movie is far from a classic. It’s a cheesy and frankly pretty terrible time travel film that is powered by one decent twist and, otherwise, seemingly makes up its own rules as it goes along. There are interesting ideas in Millennium, but the various parts of the film do not, in any way, add up to a satisfying whole.

But like with so many films from this era, I watched Millennium because it showed up in my streaming queue, with the service going, “you watched They Live. You might also like this.” I was baited, in point of fact, but I gave in and watched it anyway. Millennium isn’t good, but it’s by no means as terrible as many other random 1980s sci-fi films I vaguely remembered and then watched for this website. My Science Project, for example, is much, much worse. Still, this is bargain bin filler, the kind of movie you watch and then largely forget about soon after. Clearly I did, and I’m sure I will again once this review is done.

Millennium is focused on two characters. The first is Bill Smith (Kris Kristofferson), an investigator with the NTSB who researches plane crashes. When one commercial airliner collides with another, causing a massive crash, Bill and his team are called in to investigate and see what conclusions they can determine. The crash, though, is a real mystery, as the black box recording doesn’t line up with the evidence, and the crash itself raises more questions than it answers. Still, it seems like the basics of the crash aren’t in doubt, which Bill has to admit.

But Bill is caught up by something even stranger, our second lead character: Louise Baltimore (Cheryl Ladd). She’s seemingly working as a ticket booth girl for the airline, but when the two of them bump into each other later, Louise asks Bill out for dinner. One thing leads to another and they end up at Bill’s hotel room, even though he has to admit she is a very strange woman. She disappears after, but Bill then sees her the next night in the hangar after he finds a weird piece of tech. Louise, though, doesn’t know him yet because, as it turns out, she’s a time traveler and she’s meeting him at different points along his timeline. She rescues people from plane crashes and other disasters, and her team was the ones working this flight. But now that Bill knows what’s going on, it could cause a paradox that wipes out her whole future…

Millennium is both an intriguing film and a complete and utter mess. You can tell that the writer John Varley clearly worked backwards from a simple idea: what if a guy and a girl meet cute at different points along their timelines. He meets her, but she already knows him. He meets her again but this time she doesn’t know him. Once you have that basic structure worked out, and start detailing the timeline together, then you just need a big hook, something sexy, that will get people to put their asses in theater seats.

How about a plane crash? Okay, calling that sexy probably isn’t a good idea, but there’s no denying that it certainly is splashy. The plane crash in question comes in the opening scene of the film, and it sets all the events into action. Bill shows up because of it, he investigates, finds weird clues, and then meets Louise. It’s a pretty standard, linear storyline, and honestly for the first act of the film I even wondered if this was actually a sci-fi movie. It played it pretty straight, with a somber, serious look at how an NTSB agent would investigate a crash like this.

The problem is once that first act is done, and time traveling Louise steps into the picture properly, that somber look at plane crashes is tossed aside and suddenly we’re on a very weird, and very cheesy, sci-fi adventure. Bill stops being our main protagonist, and Louise takes over as we learn about her world, a thousand years into the future. It’s a strange twist for the film to take because it really is a hard tonal shift from the first act to the second. And it causes the audience to suddenly lose track and focus on what we’re actually here for.

It’s not that I think Louise’s storyline, going into the past to rescue people off of planes so they can live in the future, is all that bad. It’s an intriguing idea on its own. And you can understand why the writer would meld this storyline to Bill’s more staid path through the story. He’s investigating an incident that she was partially involved in. Their two paths were going to cross sooner or later. It was only a matter of time. But it’s the way the film brings it together that just doesn’t work.

Frankly, the future we see from Louise is cornball stupid. The production design is bad, the costumes are hilariously awful, and the special effects were terrible even by 1980s standards. It doesn’t have world building so much as a bunch of random ideas that are all thrown together just to see what sticks. The future is dying, so they’re collecting these people from the past to throw into an even more distant future where, they hope, they will thrive. Robots and immortal judges and strange biomechanical people all exist here, and they devote their lives to time travel. It’s a lot, and while not all of it is bad, so much of it just doesn’t work.

I think, for the time and the budget available when Millennium was made, it would have been better if the future was something that was only heard about from Louise but never seen. That adds a flair of mystery to her while keeping the film from ending up a cheesy, stupid mess. She flits in and out of Bill’s life, acting weird and seemingly forgetting details they’ve discussed, but that’s only because she’s been running missions and never reconnects with him at the same point in his life twice. They fall for each other without ever finding their same path through time. It would almost be like The Doctor and River Song over on Doctor WhoThe longest running sci-fi franchise (at least in terms of sheer seasons), Doctor Who has seen cancelations, relaunches, and reboots, but the core of the series remains the same: a madman in a box traveling through time and space., except nearly three decades earlier. That has a certain intriguing charm to it that Millennium in its current form never achieves.

The film doesn’t work, but you can almost see a way that it could have. With more time in the hopper, and pairing back many of the film’s wilder ideas, you could have made a very intriguing sci-fi thriller out of Millennium. Instead we have this silly mess that never really nails its ideas. Millennium is amusing to watch once, but it’s not a film you’re going to want to remember once the credits have rolled.