Millennium (1989) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Millennium: that’s a thousand years. And this film feels like it’s that long too!

How can a film about time travel be boring? Well look no further than 1989s Millennium which presents a dry and lifeless shell of a film, infused with half-baked ideas and improbable logic.

First Impressions

The trailer for this film opens with a plane crash which appears to be intercepted by time travelers for some reason. A man is asking another man about strange inconsistencies he has seen at crash sites, which is intercut with a beautiful blonde woman in various hair styles and futuristic looking clothes admitting she’s from 1,000 years in the future. Lots of explosions, quick shots and other weirdness appears to be going on in this mysterious trailer for Millennium.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

As a plane is crashing, a mysterious silver device is dropped on the floor, and the co-pilot gets a weird expression on his face when he sees the passengers. Later, the wreckage is being investigated by a team from the NTSB led by Bill Smith (Kris Kristofferson). They interview the air traffic controller who was on duty at the time and uncover the Black Box from the flight. As they are listening to the crew recordings–which include strange phrases about the passengers already being burned up, they are interrupted by Louise Baltimore (Cheryl Ladd), an airline hostess serving them coffee. Smith also finds that all the digital watches from the passengers are running backwards.

At the press conference given by the airline, Smith takes questions from the audience. After several relatively benign queries, Arnold Mayer (Daniel J. Travanti) steps forward and asks if there was anything out of the ordinary about this crash. He declines to answer. Mayer, a physicist, was seen earlier visiting the crash site looking for anomalies. After the press conference, Bill bumps into Louise, who already knows who he is, and they agree to go get some dinner. Flash forward to the next morning when Louise gets up early and cancels Bill’s wake-up call.

Bill is upset that he’s late for work, but Louise attempts to keep him in the room, saying he works too hard. He promises they’ll have more time tomorrow to spend together and leaves. He returns to the hotel room seconds later to apologize for his rudeness and finds Louise missing and the bed made, as if no one was ever there. In the hangar where the airplane parts are stored, Bill finds a small silver device that stuns him when he picks it up. Three women appear, including Louise–who wears more futuristic clothing, and a different hair style–to reclaim the device. Still stunned, Bill is able to recognize Louise, making these women realize they’ve created a paradox somehow. A time quake ripples from 1989 into the future, where the women return to their world. They don’t realize that the actuator of the device has fallen off and been left behind.

A thousand years into the future, Louise is prepped by Sherman (Robert Joy), an android, on the rules of time travel as she readies for a mission to 1963. She muses about her Free Will and if she is really free to choose, since she now knows she must meet Bill at another point, prior to her first meeting. Bill attends a lecture by Mayer on time travel, who makes points that time travelers must be careful to not change things, lest they cause a paradox. Louise and her team pull part of a doomed airplane into their time so they can evacuate the passengers, filling the cabin with already dead clones. They leave the one survivor, a young boy, who witnesses Louise use the stun gun, and then drop it.

The council of elders, a disheveled group of partial humans with skin grafts living in tubes, directs Louise to return to the day before she retrieved the stun gun in 1989 and prevent Bill from finding it. The sequence plays out as before with the two of them meeting. They go to dinner and discuss many things about Bill’s life. They then return to his hotel room and make love. The morning again plays out the same way, but from Louise’s perspective this time. She is unable to prevent him from leaving and it causes a time quake Force 7. Bill, now tipped off to the importance of the device, meets with Mayer to ask pointed questions about time travelers. Mayer reveals he has the device lost in 1963. Bill pulls out the actuator/battery, revealing he was the lone survivor of that ‘63 flight.

Louise arrives in her future outfit, no longer covering any pretense of her mission. She explains that in her time they can no longer have babies, so they harvest people from the past that won’t be missed. Mayer places the actuator in the stunner device, which explodes and kills him. This creates a Time Quake Force Infinity, since he was the main source of information about time travel to the future society. Louise and Bill return to the future as everyone is evacuated “beyond the gate,” further into the future. Bill refuses to go without Louise, who Sherman indicates is pregnant. They step into the portal as the world explodes from the paradoxical time quake and Sherman’s voice quotes Winston Churchill.

“Therefore you did go back.
Must go back.” – Council members Stockholm & Buffalo

History in the Making

The film Millennium is kind of frustrating. It’s got an interesting time travel premise but feels like the filmmakers have never watched any type of time travel movie before. The film was written by John Varley, based off of his short story “Air Raid,” and the novel Millennium, which was an enhanced version of his earlier story. According to an interview with Varley, he worked on six drafts of the screenplay over ten years. This was partly due to the revolving door of directors that had been attached to the project. Originally Douglas Trumbull, who had directed Brainstorm, was the first choice, but was ultimately unable to work on this film due to delays and issues with his other production. Direction was finally passed to Michael Anderson (after three other directors had been brought in and left), who was famous for a number of sci-fi and adventure films. Fans might recognize his list of credits including the 1956 adaptation of 1984, Around the World in 80 Days, Doc Savage: Man of Bronze, and Logan’s Run.

The erraticness of the film might be attributed to the various upheavals of the screenplay and direction of the film. But those are not the only elements that affect the final picture. In a decade that birthed some of the most iconic time travel stories which changed the notion of time travel in film, Millennium does its best to make the most boring science-fiction film of the 80s. Time travel films tend to be a little more exciting and cerebral examples of the sci-fi genre, mainly due to the amazing, and sometimes, crazy structure of the film. They also often feature scenes that repeat, usually from different angles directing the audience’s perspective to new elements of already shown moments. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure did this, as will Back to The Future II and Groundhog Day. These last two films are good examples of getting the best bang for the buck out of moments that the audience is already familiar with, and how to make them feel new and different. Millennium shows several of the same moments from two different perspectives, based on which version of the time loop the audience is witnessing, and there is no tension, fun, or anything else that stimulates.

Besides that, there’s very little chemistry between the lead actors. Their attraction is painfully dictated by the screenplay with the actors just going through motions. Maybe the filmmakers thought that the attraction of the plot would be enough for people not to notice. After all, in the history of time travel films, the ideas behind the time traveling plot could make for an interesting story. Unfortunately, there is a lot in the film that just doesn’t make sense. Aside from small mistakes; things that occur in every film, like continuity errors, there’s just other poorly written or poorly put together elements. For example, the first time Mayer is introduced, a reporter at the crash site asks what an “ecology professor” is doing here. Of course, in every other interaction, Mayer is identified as a physics professor. Sure, this could be chalked up to a character that is unreliable (as it’s a throwaway line, spoken very quickly). But the whole of the movie is made up of inconsistencies, characters that don’t do anything (I never even mentioned Coventry (Brent Carver) in my write-up above because as a character, he serves no purpose), and red herrings that are never chased.

Genre-fication

Millennium comes at the end of a decade that redefined the elements of time travel in cinema. From Somewhere in Time and The Terminator, Back to the Future and Star Trek IV, these movies all took elements from previous stories of time traveling and created new, fresh, and unique perspectives on the elements of the genre while crafting elements for future filmmakers to use in their stories. All these films seem to adhere to the classic notion of causality in their stories. That idea is that events that happen lead to other events happening, and in a time travel story sometimes those following events happen before the things caused them. Millennium plays with a story of circular causality which results in numerous paradoxes and levels of compounding problems. As Sherman reminds Louise, there are certain rules to time traveling, in this universe. This includes “temporal censorship,” which is the idea that the scanning technology these future people use cannot see any point in time that they have already or will visit. They also are unable to revisit a moment more than once, which is super convenient to the plot of this film. This is a relatively unique and interesting set of constraints as far as time travel films go. The plot is also unique in that a future society is stealing healthy people from the past to help rebuild their future. Unfortunately there’s a lack of further exploration of this idea. Is the future society also doing something to heal their world? There’s nothing ever seen outside of the time gate set and the council “chamber,” so no answers are provided. Millennium makes the future appear like the planes they abduct. A doomed vessel that is attempting to save it’s inhabitants, but by taking them to a place that is also doomed.

The time travel restrictions are an interesting set of rules imposed by Varley for this particular story. In this film it’s almost as if the timeline was protecting itself from the potential of paradoxes; allowing individuals to time travel, but within a certain protective framework that would keep the paradoxes to a minimum. But unfortunately, these restrictions only serve to fuel the paradoxes. A paradox in time travel stories is where an event occurs due to time travel that negates logic, such as a traveler going back in time to kill their grandfather. If the grandfather is dead, how could the traveler ever have been born? Most people agree that paradoxes are bad. Which is also the case in Millennium. The secondary goal of sending Louis and her partners into the past is to not change it, lest a paradoxical time quake (a ripple in time due to the altered events of the past) arrives in the future. Unfortunately, as Dr. Mayer points out, the sheer act of time travel invites paradoxes. And paradoxes are the one thing that can destroy the fragile future civilization. Yet they continue to send Louise back in time to fix a problem, which only causes more problems, and eventually the time quake infinity which destroys the future world. The council is neither smart nor wise, since on mission number one (from their perspective, 1989 from Bill’s) one of Louise’s team loses a stunner, then on their second mission (1963) they lose a second stunner, yet they continue sending people into the same timeline to “fix” the problem. It might have been wiser to stop while they were ahead.

Societal Commentary

The idea that the council continues to send explorers into the past or the critique of the actors just going through the motions could all be tied to the overall theme of the film, which is the same as most time travel films: fate versus free will. The film’s characters broach the subject ever so slightly in one moment when Louise returns to the future after her first mission (to 1989). She asks Sherman about not going back to retrieve the stunner. He informs her that she must go back, and she muses about her free will. That is literally the extent of the subject, but helps to prove out the worldview of this particular story. There is in fact no free will in Millennium. The story unfolds the way it always unfolds. It’s a dreary monotonous act of going through motions, as if in a dream, since these actions are by design what is supposed to happen. If anything can be said about the film to make it seem a little more engaging, it may be this: Millennium really puts forth the idea of a hopeless and dour future. Even in films where the future is apocalyptic, many other time travel films at least create a sense of hope and optimism that something can be changed. Even The Terminator had the idea that the future was not completely set. But Millennium is a downer of a film in that the characters seem to have no free will or choice of their own, and the drab, polluted future is inevitable, as is its destruction as the result of that society’s attempts to save it.

The future world of Millennium has put all their eggs in the basket labeled time travel, but why? It’s mentioned that in this future world, some 1,000 years away, the women are all sterile (perhaps the men as well). They can “make the bodies” (cloning is not explicitly stated) but they “cannot make the souls,” which seems like a weird thing to say. If they’re crafting bodies so that the fingerprints and dental records can be identified by the relatives (as Louise says), then why can’t they make living people? It seems like the society has the wrong priorities, working on time travel instead of cleaning the pollution, or figuring out how to repair their world. Instead they send people into the past to take others away from a horrific death and give them a second chance. It’s a noble gesture, and one that seems altruistic, since they don’t seem to be using these people to help repopulate the future, or at least that’s how Louise explains it. So then where are all the new people in the future coming from? The sterility must be a relatively new issue in that case. Another possible choice that becomes evident with Louise’s traveling is sending future women into the past to become pregnant. Louise admits to being sterile, but yet somehow her encounter with Bill in the past leads to her pregnancy, at least according to Sherman. And the revelation comes only seconds before the destruction of the world. The filmmakers have created as down an ending to this film as they possibly can, in what might be a response to the hopelessness that they feel in regards to their present times. While the 80s were a time of economic boom, at least for the United States, the increased industrial and corporate growth shattered many ideals about the direction of the country. In that sense, Millennium seems like a dire warning, but one that is also inevitable.

The Science in The Fiction

Millennium makes a study of airline crashes, and goes to great lengths to present the reality of these accidents. As with previous decades with commercial air travel, the 1980s was rife with accidents due to human error, mechanical failings and terrorism. The film presents examples of two of these. The first in 1963 where a hijacker’s gun causes the crash of the flight that young William Smith (nee Collins) is flying on. The second is the 1989 incident that opens the film where two planes get close enough to crash, which also indicts the air traffic controller as a possible cause. The production gathered much debris from scrap planes and laid out a crash site that anecdotally was described as shocking to onlookers that were unaware that film was being made. At least the first third of the film deals with the investigatory procedures that the NTSB would go through in an event like this, such as attempting to identify as many passengers as possible, reassembling the wreckage into a semblance of the plane to look for the cause, and recovering the black box. It’s these elements that present Bill with the inclination that something weird is going on. The recordings indicate that the passengers were already dead and burned prior to the crash. The debris contained the future stunner. And the personal effects of the passengers yielded the backwards running wristwatches.

As a counterpoint, almost nothing is shown about the world of the future. Louise tells Bill of a lot of the problems, but this is all anecdotal. There is much to be inferred from the technology seen however. The time travel elements are all based on Dr. Mayer’s work, as Sherman mentions. Why it takes 1,000 years for anyone to create this seems like too much of a stretch. Given the apocalyptic and dour looking world, it would seem like records from the previous ages would have been lost. The future society does have methods of keeping people alive long after they should have died by evidence of Coventry and the council. He appears to have cyborg parts used to keep his organic elements living, and the council is made up of characters ranging from Stockholm, who has a sheet of skin stretched over her face, to another that appears to be just a nervous system and brain in a tube. Tech workers are shown with computer circuitry grafted to their faces. Why? Probably to imply that this is the future, but given all the other elements of the future, the technology seems improbable. By most appearances, certain aspects of the film were meticulously thought out while others were apparently crafted on the fly.

The Final Frontier

Millennium is only a one note film. It has the chance to have been something greater, but fails on almost every level. The characters are wooden, the plot is potentially convoluted, and it just doesn’t connect with the audience, whether in 1989 or today. The biggest failing is in thinking that time travel alone as a plot element will carry the film, when in reality the use of engaging characters and their stories is the true throughline. It did try to be clever in a number of ways, such as naming the robotic assistant Sherman, which is most-likely a nod to the time traveling boy assistant of the Peabody and Sherman cartoons from the 60s. But the film has no humor, no spark that pulls in the audience. It crafts a mystery that is really only mysterious to the characters, and not the viewer, and starts and ends on horrible things; a plane crash and the destruction of the world. Not even Sherman’s strange voice-over ending, quoting Winston Churchill (“This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning.”), can help.

There was a TV series in the early 90s called Millennium but that should not be confused with this film. It starred Lance Henriksen as an FBI agent who did criminal profiling. It was a spin-off from The X-Files and featured paranormal elements, but luckily no time travel plots about future societies hijacking airplanes. Paradoxically, no other related material spun-off from this film. Time travel films should impart some sense of adventure, optimism, or at least fun in the mind of the viewer. If they don’t then they should have a significant thematic reason for doing so. To this end, and to prove that paradoxes can actually be fun, the next Sci-Fi Saturdays film will be a much better example of the way that time travel can be handled. See you in the future!

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