Retro Review: MILLENNIUM (1989)

MILLENNIUM
(US - 1989)


One of the chintziest-looking major-studio sci-fi movies of the 1980s, MILLENNIUM spent over a decade in development before it was finally made as sloppily and ambivalently as possible. Written by John Varley and based on his short story "Air Raid," MILLENNIUM is thus far the only screenplay by the author, whose short story "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" became a 1981 AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE episode that later ended up on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. MILLENNIUM was first put in pre-production as far back as 1979, with visual effects innovator Douglas Trumbull, best known for his work on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, set to direct and Paul Newman and Jane Fonda attached to star. That fell apart, putting it in turnaround and by the time it was ultimately made in 1989, the director was Michael Anderson (AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, LOGAN'S RUN, ORCA), with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd starring. It's a time-jumping sci-fi would-be epic, opening with a mysterious plane crash in 1989 that's been engineered from 1000 years into the future, with the "victims" appearing to be burned to death even before the plane goes down in 1989 but actually transported to 2989 in a "timequake" for reasons that will become clear--relatively speaking--much later. Crash investigator Bill Smith (Kristofferson) finds a strange weapon--a "stunner"--amidst the wreckage, a piece of evidence left behind by Louise Baltimore (Ladd), a warrior from the future. Her mission is to stop Smith, who senses he's met Baltimore somewhere before (because, duh, he has), and Dr. Arnold Mayer (Daniel J. Travanti, his post-HILL STREET BLUES big screen career going nowhere), a nosy physicist investigating strange phenomena surrounding a series of plane crashes, from figuring out the purpose of the "stunner" and causing a paradox that will forever alter the future in a Butterfly Effect sort-of way.