I have been reliably informed that April is the month for guilty pleasures.
Though I don't think you should ever feel guilty about something you love, I'm willing to concede
that there are films out there I might not be completely proud of myself for enjoying.
"We'll be at this all day."
Some of these can be chalked up to simple nostalgia, because as a kid in the eighties and
early nineties, I would go to the video store and rent just about anything, especially if the cover
looked flashy. The subject of today's review is one such film, a movie that I rented based solely
on the cover art. I'm sure most people will tell me this movie is absolutely a guilty pleasure.
However, I am not at all ashamed to love it, and I'm here to tell you why.
"Yeah, I'm listening."
Bill Smith, an investigator of plane crashes, knows in his gut that there's something different
about his latest job. The cockpit tape has a bizarre outburst from one of the flight crew,
a few of the watches recovered from the wreckage are running backwards,
and most importantly, after he finds a strange device that temporarily paralizes him,
he is visited by women from the future who tell him to forget they were ever there,
even though he had already met one of them the day before. Unable to forget this remarkable woman,
he sets out to unravel the mystery, unaware that he may be putting all of reality at risk.
Before we go any further, if you could please hit that like button, we might be able to stave
off the next time quake. If you really do like this video, please subscribe as well.
Thank you in advance. With that out of the way, let's get back to the subject at hand.
Our story begins with John Herbert Varley,
a science-fiction writer who emerged in the mid-seventies and would, over the years,
achieve multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for his fiction.
In 1977, he published a short story called "Air Raid" that outlined the basic idea of a
group of time travelers from a distant, dystopian future replacing passengers on a doomed airplane
flight so that they may be used to repopulate the human race on distant, Earth-like worlds.
MGM optioned this story to be expanded into a feature film. In its earliest incarnation,
the film "Air Raid" was going to be directed by the effects legend Douglas Trumbull and would star
Paul Newman and Jane Fonda. However, due to pretty serious problems in the production of Trumbull's
other film at the time, Brainstorm--which I swear I'll get to one of these days,
because it's a hell of a behind the scenes story--Trumbull had to drop out of the project.
Other directors were then attached: Randal Kleiser, Richard Rush, Alvin Rakoff,
and Phillip Borsos, each of which had differing visions for the film. The original story's writer,
John Varley, stepped in to write the screenplay throughout these directorial hand-offs,
with the script going through significant changes each time. In 1983, Varley went ahead
and published a novel out of how he wanted the story to play out, using the new name Millennium.
At some point, the project changed hands to Gladden Entertainment--the
production house of David Begelman, former COO of MGM and one-time head of United Artists
whose career would later go up in flames due to multiple financial scandals--and
the film would be distributed by 20th Century Fox. Finally, a director was settled on,
the veteran Michael Anderson, known for the original adaptation of 1984,
Doc Savage, Logan's Run, and the 1980 miniseries version of The Martian Chronicles. The movie was
then planned to be filmed in Toronto on what I can only assume was a relatively meager budget.
Bill Smith is played by the singer/songwriter/actor Kris Kristofferson--best
known to moviegoers for the infamous Heaven's Gate and the 1976 version of A Star is Born.
At first blush, Kristofferson is kind-of an odd choice for a romantic male lead in a sci-fi flick.
However--and I will die on this hill--I actually think he's the perfect choice for the role. He
completely embodies the part of an exhausted, divorced government bureaucrat who sees nothing
but death and destruction day in and day out, looking down the barrel of middle age with nothing
much to show for it. Granted, his chemistry with the female lead never quite works and his most
heroic-sounding lines late in the film do linger uncomfortably like something the cat dropped off--
"If you had left things alone, none of this would have happened."
"I did what I had to do."
--but if I didn't know who the actor was and I was told this guy really
was a worker for the National Transportation Safety Board, I would totally believe it.
As for the female lead, the wonderfully-named Louise Baltimore, they cast Cheryl Ladd,
best known for being Farrah Fawcett's replacement on Charlie's Angels and, like Kristofferson,
for having a surprisingly successful singing career. The actress is fourteen years younger
than Kristofferson, but that gap feels even larger with Kristofferson's permanently grizzly look,
which goes a long way to making their chemistry questionable at best.
Ladd also doesn't quite sell the goofy science-fiction dialogue she is saddled with,
but where she absolutely shines is in the awkward fish out of water scenes where she
tries to blend in with the late 1980's despite being from a thousand years in the future.
"Are we almost there?"
"Another two minutes at this velocity."
Her comedic timing is great and endearing, and it's easy to imagine a cynical man being
attracted to her general oddness, not to mention her Hollywood good looks.
Another hill I am prepared to die on is this absolutely ludicrous hair when
her character is in the future. It's just so... 1989. I love it.
"It's awful."
Other notable actors include Hill Street Blues' Daniel Travanti as the obsessed physicist Dr.
Mayer, the Shakespearean actor and future CSI: NY star Robert Joy as the robot Sherman, who may or
may not be named after Peabody's pet boy Sherman, and Nero Wolfe himself, Maury Chaykin, as Roger.
Chaykin also appeared in the lesser known horror film Of Unknown Origin, which I only mention
because one of my old English professors wrote the book it was based on. (He didn't like the movie.)
Filming on Millenium began in April of 1988 on an eleven week schedule. The largest set was the time
travel base, built inside an abandoned transformer factory, and the airplane crash site was staged
in a Toronto suburb called Kleinberg, where it was realistic enough that planes flying overhead
were reporting it as a real crash. The other large set constructed for the film was Dr. Mayer's home,
which was made to look like Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water House.
The movie ultimately released in August of 1989 to disastrous reviews and a domestic box office total
of five point seven million dollars. It did okay
on the home video and late night cable markets, but for the most part,
it remains a largely forgotten bit of sci-fi schlock from the late eighties.
For me, though, the legacy of Millennium remains strong. Now I swear this video wasn't
designed to be one long advertisement for my own novel, but I can trace to Millennium the seeds
of the idea for Paradox (available through Amazon in paperback or on Kindle). You see,
when I saw this film for the first time, I loved it for its concept,
though even at a young age, I was well aware of its flaws.
"I'm not sure I know what you mean."
I was fascinated by the idea of people from a damaged future infiltrating the present,
knowing they'd have to be careful to remain as invisible as possible so as not to mess
with their own history. However, one thing that practically infuriated me was the idea of "time
quakes" sending shockwaves into the future whenever the time travelers cause a paradox.
"A paradox, Louise! You've changed the past!"
I knew there had to be a better way to handle the paradox conundrum--
"That means you were never born, and if you weren't, how did you build the time machine?"
--and that started me on a lifelong journey into an amateur's understanding of the underlying
physics of time travel, particularly the work of Kip S. Thorne. I then wanted to write a
story that did it better than Millennium, and if I may forego my usual humility for a second,
I think I succeeded, no offense to John Varley, who is a far more successful writer than I am.
That said, when I watched Millennium again for the purposes of this review,
I tried to be objective about it, tried to forget all of my history with the movie and just watch it
as I would any other eighties sci-fi adventure. In that way, I will admit that this is not an
objectively great film by any stretch of the imagination. The acting is pretty terrible--even
from actors who I know can do better--the music by Eric Robertson is obnoxious, the editing is hacky,
and the climax is almost incoherent due to obvious budget limitations and weird re-edits,
like this clearly ADR'd line revealing that Baltimore is inexplicably pregnant:
"Go with him. You are going to have his child."
Also, as a story, it's basically just about a woman who is so absolutely awful at her job that
she causes the destruction of reality. Really, that--that's what happens. She goes back in time
over and over, progressively making things worse and worse, until she causes a paradox
so great it basically kills everyone who doesn't jump into an unknown distant future,
a plot point that also happens to make no sense whatsoever.
Still, dang it, I really enjoy this story, in spite of its flaws.
I love the way it unfolds its mystery; I love its handful of really well-executed plot twists;
and I love the way it handles the time travel itself, outside of those stupid
time quakes. I like that, halfway through, we revisit scenes from a different point of view,
but Anderson, the director, never resorts to cheap tricks like showing the exact same footage over again.
And while I have admitted that I don't think the leads have much in the way of romantic chemistry,
I do like that this is, at its heart, a romance rather than the action movie I'm sure
most studio executives would have wanted to turn it into. It has a certain charm, carried
in large part by Kristofferson's nonplussed reactions to Cheryl Ladd's many quirky faux pas.
I feel genuinely upset that Sherman doesn't go with them in the end,
and I could only feel that way if I actually cared about these characters, which I do.
So, no matter what anybody else says, I hereby certify 1989's Millennium
not only a great little gem of a film, but also a sci-fi classic.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. Have you ever found a diamond in the rough that
nobody else seems to appreciate the way you do? Let me know in the comments, and while you're
there, don't forget to like and subscribe if you haven't already. If you'd like to support what I
do even more, please consider joining my Patreon to get access to bonus content, vote on future
topics, and more. Also check out my podcasts, The Streaming Heap and From Here to Paternity,
available wherever you get your podcasts, and yes, I'll plug it again, don't forget to snag a copy
of my debut novel, Paradox, available through Amazon. You can find links in the description
and on my website at emagill.com, where you'll find written reviews of plenty more sci-fi
classics in both film and literature. Until next time, though, when we'll find ourselves
trapped my a malevolent intelligence of our own making, this is The Unapologetic Geek,
telling you to never be ashamed of what you love, even if it happens to be the movie Millennium.
"Suffragette movement, Nineteenth Amendment, Rosie the Riveter,
bra burning, Gloria Steinem, the ERA, the battle of the sexes. Who won?"