Millennium
Tags: alternate history

Plot synopsis:
A U.S. passenger airliner in 1989 is about to be struck from above by another airliner on a landing approach. The pilot handles the airplane as well as he can while the flight engineer goes back to check on the passenger cabin. He comes back in the cockpit screaming, "They're dead! All of them! They're burned up!"
Bill Smith is a National Transportation Safety Board investigator hired to determine whether the collision and subsequent crash of both aircraft was due to some mechanical fault or human error on the part of either pilot. He and his team of investigators are confused by the flight engineer's words on the cockpit voice recorder, as there is no evidence of a fire on board before the plane hit the ground. At the same time, a theoretical physicist named Dr. Arnold Mayer has a professional curiosity about the crash, which borders on science fiction. While giving a lecture, he talks about time travel and the possibility of visitors from the future.
Time travelers are visiting the present day and stealing passengers from doomed aircraft. In the future, because of pollution, the human population is no longer able to reproduce, so teams are sent in to the past to abduct groups of people who are about to die and keep them in stasis until they will be sent into the far future to repopulate the Earth. While many people in the future are in poor health, some are healthy enough to successfully pass for 20th Century humans, and are given the best of food and care so that they can successfully infiltrate, using reproductions of contemporary clothing.
Every incursion into the past causes an accompanying "timequake" whose magnitude is proportional to the effects of the incursion. Each "timequake" causes physical damage in the time from which the incursion has been made. This is why they are abducting people who will not be able to affect the future any further and replacing them with copies of those who would have died. Thus, the flight engineer's strange comment came because all the passengers had been replaced with pre-burned duplicates in preparation for the impending crash.
While on a mission to 1963, a time travel operative on board a plane is shot before it crashes, losing a stun weapon as a result. This weapon winds up in the possession of Dr. Mayer, setting him on the path to working out what is happening. Twenty-five years later, Smith finds a similar artifact among the wreckage of the crash portrayed at the beginning of the film.
Worried that the 20th century discoveries made by Smith and Mayer might change history, Louise Baltimore travels back to 1989 to distract Bill Smith and discourage him from pursuing his investigation further. Louise gains Bill's trust and seduces him into a one-night stand, which she hopes will complete the distraction. It is later revealed that Louise becomes pregnant as a result of this encounter. As a consequence of further errors on the part of the time travel team and paradoxical events, Bill becomes even more suspicious. He soon pays a visit to Dr. Mayer. Louise materializes from the future and reveals her mission to both of them in the hope that they will voluntarily keep quiet. In a mishap with the stun weapon, Mayer inadvertently kills himself.
Mayer was instrumental in the development of the Gate technology that made time travel possible, so his death results in an unresolvable paradox – a force infinity timequake – which will destroy the entire civilization of the "present" future. The only course of action is to send all of the people who have been collected into the distant future before the Gate is permanently destroyed. Louise goes with Bill to the future.
Bill and Louise step through the Gate and disappear: they are transported to another time and place, saving their lives, and allowing them to fulfil a destiny to repopulate the Earth. As a cataclysmic explosion destroys the Gate and the blast wave engulfs him, Sherman the Robot quotes Winston Churchill: "This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning."

Review: Millennium is one the few movies about time travel that stays true to the original source material.
They're an effective device for showing the parallel but very different points of view of the key characters.In sum, Millennium is a reasonably good but not great movie.
Good premise and a few comedic touches enhance this time travel tale starring Cheryl Ladd (who, in my opinion is an very underrated actress) and Kris Kristofferson.
I have to admit that although the (not so) special effects could have been better and the last line at the end should have been left out, it's still a memorable film that will entertain most time travel fans.
As I was watching this movie, I actually expected most people wouldn't get it because time-travel pictures are usually too confusing for people with linear minds.
If you go see (or rent) a sci-fi movie based on an obscure short story directed by the man who had Bo Derek battling a whale in "Orca" twelve years earlier, you have to expect some campiness.
In execution, the people behind this movie must have known that they did not have the budget for a special effects-laden thrill ride, so they decided to take the stylistic approach of making it with one eyebrow raised, a bittersweet melodrama that happens to have a few plane crashes and laser beams.
If you like sci-fi because it gives writers the chance to provide plots that make one think outside the square and provide concepts that make you stop and ponder even weeks or years later, then this movie is definitely for you!
Indeed, I guarantee you will enjoy it and perhaps even come to love it as I have despite its obvious shortcomings.If you like nice tidy productions with crisp acting and wonderful cinematography and wish to see something not very taxing on the mind, stay away from this movie!
the wonderful wonderful plot that really makes this movie many times over.By my rating of this film you can clearly see which camp I sit in.
Although it has its share of flaws (special effects are weak and the acting is mixed), but the plot is excellent and the concepts and implications introduced regarding time travel creative and thought provoking.
But from this point on (and this is no spoiler as it happens in the first three minutes) all those who love stories about time travel, and the paradoxes and potentials therein are in for a great ride.
Some fairly healthy specimens relatively like Cheryl Ladd are treated like pampered pets because they have to do some time traveling.This trip takes her to 1989 when Millennium came to the theaters.
What Travanti does is totally mess with the future of planet Earth as Ladd knows it.Although some have trashed Millennium I've found it to be a thought provoking movie about time traveling and about our lax attitude toward the environment which gives Ladd the future she lives in.
It is campy, no doubt, and there are a couple of scenes that try to take themselves seriously and fall flat, but overall I thought it was a clever, original film with lots of sci-fi fan humor and a bunch of unexpected but meaningful plot twists.If you like campy, idealistic sci-fi you might want to give it a shot..
Millennium is a movie that does not fully convince as a sci-fi probably because of the rather tired romance plot added to the script.
His enquiries are further enhanced by premonitions of an attractive young woman who may hold the key to why the crash happened...Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd prove themselves as credible film stars, but their talents are hampered by the poor overall impression given out by Millennium.
Add to that rather tame special effects and a sudden uninspiring ending, Millennium is certainly no masterpiece and will be easily forgotten.An interesting premise proves a let down for an avid film fan like myself but is lifted up by Ladd, who proves she can portray a character far beyond Angel Kris Munroe.
Soon Bill learns that Louise is a time traveler from one thousand year from the future, when the population is sterile, and replaces the passengers from airplanes that will crash by corpses with the same characteristics.
Kris Krisstoferson and Cheryl Ladd (I always had a crush on Ladd,) are perfect as Smith and Baltimore, and the time travel aspect was interwoven throughout the story, jumping from present to future to past and much more.
(Humm, Just a thought out loud, these same people seem to have no problem with movies like Pulp Fiction doing this.) My only complaints are with the duplicate scenes, while they are necessary to the story line they are too long, they should have been kept much shorter lasting just long enough to fill in the blanks from the first time around.
Here's a guilty pleasure for science-fiction buffs: Kris Kristofferson plays a plane crash investigator who becomes involved with a mysterious woman (the smoldering Cheryl Ladd, looking quite the fox); turns out she's a time-traveling visitor from the future who rescues doomed passengers aboard crippled airliners, replacing them with lookalike corpses.
Travanti is terrific in support as a wily physicist and time travel specialist with a Cheshire cat-like grin; Kristofferson is quite commendable, and Ladd is frequently amazing.
His inquiries attract his attention (and affections) to a mysterious girl, who eventually reveals the truth that people from the future are traveling back in time to steal passengers that are about to die on airplane crashes.
While this is a very interesting premise, all the interesting science fiction and mystery elements are unfortunately made nearly worthless by the horrible pacing, extremely poor dialogue, annoying redundancy (we see many of the more boring scenes twice from different perspectives!), and worst of all, the silly romance plot.
When will Hollywood learn that never every movie needs a romantic subplot and a unrealistic happy ending...FINAL RATING: 5/10 - The only reason I even give it a 5 is because of the interesting premise and nice production design.
This movie should be a total piece of ****, but what comes through all the bad acting, cheesy effects, bizarre plot turns, and embarrassing characters, is a lot of heart and an actual dark and dank apocalyptic film which is just as optimistic, NAY MORE OPTIMISTIC, than anything the STAR TREK universe has presented to us viewers to date.
As below - yes its cheesy, yes the main characters could have done better to stick with their type cast roles (none appear to have suffered as a result though ) , yes its got Tron type effects, and yes its really not to be compared to the blockbusters of the day , BUTFor a decent script movie thats been dispatched to the small screen, it really does have a lot of redeeming features.
The interesting aspect of time travel paradoxes and an apocalyptic future in the movie is worth wading through the boring love scenes between the main characters.
If you are intelligent and able to relax as opposed to trying to assert your ego onto how a film should be made (it's not your creation, it is someone else's!), then you will enjoy this movie, despite it's 1989 feel--which I prefer to look at as a time-travelling view in itself.
However, MILLENNIUM (1989) needs to be credited with attempting an even more ambitious storyline that incorporates the time paradox (what happens when someone goes into the past and attempts or accidentally changes it) which also evolved from a short story into a screenplay and novel by John Varley, a reputable science fiction writer in his own right and who has won the both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for science fiction.
MILLENNIUM echoes back to the lingering 70s and 80s television genre with its stylish prime time soap operatic nature like Dynasty that seems to date MILLENNIUM and ironically freezes the movie in a period of cinematic history as does in some ways THE TIME MACHINE.Nevertheless as a serious science fiction movie, it successfully focuses on the time paradox and plays with its convoluted nature to relatively good effect, much superior to infantile nature of the much more dated and cheesy JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME (1967) or THE DAY TIME ENDED (1980), though unlike BACK TO THE FUTURE and more like THE TIME MACHINE, it ultimately ends up with the haunting suggestive climatic scene which in some ways however is much more unfocused yet supposedly uplifting by the musical score, suggestive of how, one of the classics of science fiction genre, THX-1138 (1979) ended a decade earlier.More successful time travel movies that avoided the frozen cinematic period of its production than MILLENNIUM include the romantic comedy science fiction movie (that only indirectly suggests the time paradox in its storyline - the use of H.G. Well's original glasses that were broken and replaced) entitled TIME AFTER TIME (1979), PLANET OF THE APES (1968) that wows the audience by its climax involving its movie reveal that doesn't so much result in a paradox however, BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) (which also avoided a time paradox and laid out a suggested time travel option only at the end of the movie for a sequel to come), LOST IN SPACE (1998) that uses the time paradox for its big impact at the end of the movie, and even one of the best contemporary time travel movies 12 MONKEYS (1995) that did incorporate the time paradox but only briefly as LOST IN SPACE but to great effect for its climatic scene in much the same way that A BEAUTIFUL MIND (2001) or even A SIXTH SENSE (1999) accomplishes its revealed movie twist both considered classics in their own right.There are also the more fanciful explorations of time fluidity consequences such as the romantic fantasy GROUNDHOG DAY (1993) and even the most current science fiction, action thriller time looping effort of SOURCE CODE (2011) which is an emotionally tinged and appealing movie that perhaps rivals or finally excels MILLENNIUM in its cinematic impact.
MILLENNIUM, while its place in film history is frozen by its production values set in the 80s, has retained its place in time travel movies as a credit to its genre (but ironically itself stuck in time)..
And that's a shame, because it has many good moments that deserve a little more love.It's about an air-crash investigator (Kris Kristofferson) who discovers that there's more than meets the eye going on when he finds what could well be an 'alien' device among the ruins of a downed plane.
However, just as I was really getting into it, the story slowed to practically as stand-still and (thanks to its time travel narrative) - literally - went over old ground and spent a fair portion of the film telling us something that we already had seen, only in a longer, more pointless version.Granted, it picks up again towards the end and, talking of the final act, the ending does leave a little bit up to your own interpretation, so if you like your stories totally cleared-up then you could be a bit disappointed.This was a shame, as if this middle segment could have been reworked, then the whole film would have benefited (and possibly found its way to a wider, more appreciative/mainstream audience).
I am a huge fan of time travel films, which is why I watched this but ultimately this film is below average in terms of acting, plot, story and action/effects (taking into account the age of the film).
If you've read the book, the film will please you.If you haven't, then like so many others, the film will confuse you.The screenplay is fairly accurate and follows the book quite closely.The acting is average for KC but does not distract from the overall feeling of a story (which you should already know) being told quite well.Fans of Cheryl will appreciate the opportunity to see her in a more dynamic role than the usual Charlies Angles style pap that you may be used to.Overall, a pleasing adaptation of JV's story.--greg.
The time travel idea is still interesting which makes the movie watchable..
Adding some real sexy spark to the investigation is Cheryl Ladd, (someone you couldn't more perfectly cast) a woman a thousand years (hence the title) from the future, who holds the key, sent back in time, parading as your not everyday hostess to check on how the investigation's going, while suffering a bit of a mishap, prefore, when dealing with a male hijacker.
There are people out there, who will no doubt, think Millennium's the pits, where I liked it for it's story and performances, notably Ladd's, Brent Carver's as one ugly human, whose face looks to have been burnt up, who is Ladd's boss on the other side, where we also have an R2 D2 robot (Joy) who of course later on, went onto to play some interesting and vile characters, in some blood and guts horrors of the millennium.
Drags on for about twenty minutes, and then the most incredible crew of drag queens, led by a terrible looking, punky Cheryl Ladd, invade the film with a coterie of the worst (somewhat) live actors, mechanical men and make up jobs the world has ever seen.
Another plus: the end of the movie, and of the pain.There's just too many cons to cover fully - poor acting, vague direction, TOO low of a budget and special effects, terrible writing, unsatisfactory plot resolution, horrible redundancy...
Kris Krisstoferson gives a really good performance and Cheryl Ladd is OK for the most of her screen time and that's it.
An interesting premise (time travelers go back in time to abduct passengers before they die in plane crashes and use them to populate the polluted future) is almost negated by cheesy performances from a C-list cast (Krist Kristofferson, Cheryl Ladd, Robert Joy, Daniel J.
1st watched 1/24/2011 -- 3 out of 10 (Dir- Michael Anderson): Dumb, romanticized time story about a group of dying future people who interrupt plane crashes to do some people switching to keep their race going.
The movie stars the ever-expressive Kris Kristofferson, who is a crash inspector and the former Charlie's Angel -- Cheryl Ladd, as the time traveler who's trying to fix things.
Also, if it wanted to be seen as camp, there should have been something that seemed intentionally humorous or at least intentionally awful (like a good 'B' movie).
It is no secret that I like time-travel movies.
I'm sure they picked some airport in Canada and figured nobody would know the difference.The time travel / body snatchers element of "story" was mildly interesting, and would have made a good 1 hour New Twilight Zone episode.Michael Anderson did a much better job of directing Logan's Run, which appears to be his only commercial success in the last quarter of the 20th century.In short, if you are looking for something to show your movie-geek friends on BAD-MOVIE night, this one will make you the winner for the month (unless somebody else has an out of print "copy of KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park").This is one of the few flicks I actually recommend for its overwhelming horribleness!.
This movie is put the final nails in the coffins for Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson.
Not to be confused with the later classic series with Lance Henriksen, this science fiction story has a NTSB investigator(played by Kris Kristofferson) looking into a seemingly routine crash, but discovers certain anomalies, and then encounters a mysterious and beautiful woman,(Cheryl Ladd) who takes something from the wreckage.
In those days, I was a young lad, I thought there was nothing better than a good time travel movie.
I don't think the concept of using airplane victims to preserve our future has ever been put on film, but it gets delivered pointedly in this back shelf treasure.The film really works and with Cheryl Ladd giving the performance of her career, you get time travel with sex appeal and sincerity.
Just the whole idea of time travel and people being abducted it sucks you into this movie.
And Bill gets the beautiful girl(who smokes three packs of cigarettes an HOUR.) This unusual time traveler is played by Cheryl Ladd (who was the last of the original "Charlie's Angels") There are a few clever sub-plots.This is a GREAT movie.
Perhaps that's why fans like me keep watching it over and over again hoping maybe this time the film makers will get it right!
The oddest of which is why a bombshell like Cheryl Ladd would buy him dinner and take him to bed the same night.A Nobel Laureate is also investigating this and other mysterious plane crashes.The explanation is simple, time travelers from 1,000 years in the future are abducting healthy people from the past fated to die in plane crashes.
Recall the great build up for sci-fi films like 'Flight of the Navigator' and 'Deja Vu.' Here, it's just not the intriguing.In conclusion, 'Millennium' IS worth your time just for the phenomenal premise alone!
This has to be absolutely the best movie ever made about disappearing airplanes, AND starring both Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd.
I would also advise sci-fi fans to rent the movie, but for completely different reasons: it's sunny, occasionally funny, camp and the subject of time travel as always is fascinating.
It is also always interesting to see how the people of the past used to view the future.See the film, then read the story (not the other way round) and you will probably enjoy both..
Almost Better Than It Is. After reading several pages of reviews of this movie I'm having one of those "Did I watch the same film as everyone else?" moments.The story here is not at all complicated.
The only good thing I found was looking at Cheryl Ladd !!.