Millennium: 12 Monkeys 0.5
I vaguely remember watching 1989’s Millennium once in my childhood. While mostly a forgettable film, the ending stuck with me, with its booming voice-over narration making grand sweeping proclamations. With Millennium available on Netflix, I decided to give it another watch, to see how it held up. In my opinion, it hasn’t held up well.
As the movie opens in all its 1980s title-card glory, a plane crashes under mysterious circumstances. Bill Smith (Kris Kristofferson) of the NTSB is called in to investigate. During his investigation, he keeps running into the mysterious Louise (Cheryl Ladd). After a brief courtship, they end up sleeping together, only for Louise to disappear the next morning.
As it turns out, Louise is no ordinary woman. She’s a time traveler from 1,000 years into the future. In her time, everyone is dying. To save the human race, Louise and others travel back in time to rescue victims of plane crashes just before they’re about to die. The hope is that these people will be sent into the future to restart the human race. But time travel is tricky, and paradoxes have consequences. One false move, and Louise could destroy her present with one small misstep in the past.
On the surface, Millennium has a lot going for it with the caliber of names attached. Kris Kristofferson had shaken off the stigma of the 1980 box-office bomb Heaven’s Gate. Cheryl Ladd was a big star, thanks to Charlie’s Angels. And director Michael Anderson had previously directed big sci-fi projects, such as 1984 (1956) and Logan’s Run (1976).
So What went wrong here? Blame development hell. In a 1992 newspaper interview, writer John Varley (who wrote the screenplay from his short story “Air Raid”) voiced his frustration on the Hollywood process:
“We had the first meeting on Millennium in 1979. I ended up writing it six times. There were four different directors, and each time a new director came in I went over the whole thing with him and rewrote it. Each new director had his own ideas, and sometimes you’d gain something from that, but each time something’s always lost in the process, so that by the time it went in front of the cameras, a lot of the vision was lost.”
Although rewrites can make a script tighter, in Millennium’s case, the opposite happened: the originality unraveled with each pass. By the time the movie was filmed, the result was a mess, which is evident on the screen. While Primer is held up as the perfect example of a confusing time-travel movie, at least that movie conforms to its own internal logic. Millennium doesn’t. Louise is constantly worrying about creating a world-ending paradox, yet she brazenly interacts with people in her past. The butterfly effect is at once the centerpiece of the film and ignored when the time comes for the two leads to sleep together.
Louise’s motivations are also relatively unexplained, until the end. Why exactly were people in the future collecting airline passengers? It’s a baffling idea that needed more detail. Instead, the audience is treated to a deliberate courtship between Bill and Louise, leaving little time for the sci-fi portions of the movie.
A council member, who has obviously seen better days.
Millennium has some interesting concepts that were later explored elsewhere. Terry Gilliam seems to have been influenced by this film when he was creating Twelve Monkeys, as the set nature of the future as well as the idea of a time traveler going back multiple times to a date in the past seem borrowed from this movie. Given the current popularity of high-concept sci-fi movies, I would like to see someone take a better stab at Millennium. When done right, time travel movies are unparalleled in their twists and turns; it’s too bad this one seemed intent on virtually ignoring its nature until the very end.
Millennium tl;drs
Quick summary: When a plane crashes, Bill Smith is on the scene to investigate. His investigation into the crash of Flight 35 is complicated by the presence of Louise, a time traveler bent on preventing a paradox that will destroy her future.
Too many writers? Just one, novelist John Varley.
Recommended if you like: time-travel plot holes
Better than I expected? The idea of women being time-traveling badasses must have seemed radical in 1989.
Worse than I hoped? The high concept never really goes anywhere, leaving me wondering what the point of the film was.
Should it be rebooted? It’d be interesting to see a modern take on this; there’s nothing to connect the movie to the turn of the century but the title.
Verdict: Meandering and full of plot holes, Millennium is a C-grade sci-fi movie at best.
Related Reading: Wiki article
