Millennium (film)

Millennium is a 1989 science fiction film directed by Michael Anderson and starring Kris Kristofferson, Cheryl Ladd, Robert Joy, Brent Carver, Al Waxman and Daniel J. Travanti. The original score was composed by Eric N. Robertson. It was marketed with the tagline "The people aboard Flight 35 are about to land 1,000 years from where they planned to."

This article is about the 1989 film. For the Millennium TV-series and other movies pertaining to Millennium, see Millennium (disambiguation).
Millennium
Directed byMichael Anderson
Produced by
Screenplay byJohn Varley
Based on"Air Raid"
by John Varley
Starring
Music byEric N. Robertson
CinematographyRene Ohashi
Edited byRon Wisman
Production
company
Gladden Entertainment
Distributed by20th Century Fox
Release date
  • August 25, 1989 (1989-08-25)
Running time
108 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Box office$5.8 million[1]

Millennium is based on the 1977 short story "Air Raid" by John Varley. Varley started work on a screenplay in 1979, and released the expanded story in book-length form in 1983 as Millennium.

Plot

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 plane as well as he can while the first officer goes to check on the passenger cabin. He returns to the cockpit yelling, "They're dead! All of them! They're burned up!"

Bill Smith is a National Transportation Safety Board investigator hired to investigate the collision and subsequent crashes. He and his team are confused by the first officer's words on the cockpit voice recorder, as there is no evidence of a fire before the crash. Meanwhile, a theoretical physicist, Dr. Arnold Mayer, has a professional curiosity about the crash, which borders on science fiction. In a lecture, he talks about the possibility of visits from time travelers.

In the future, pollution has rendered humans unable to reproduce, so teams are sent into the past to abduct people who are about to die; the plane crashes were part of this plan. The abductees are kept in stasis until they can be sent into the far future to repopulate the Earth. Many people are in poor health but those sent into the past—mostly women—are relatively healthy and are given the best food and care so that they can pass for 20th-century humans. Present-day air is too clean for the time travelers to process; they smoke cigarettes to mimic the atmosphere they are used to. They are warned about not smoking enough when they return to the future.

Every incursion into the past causes an accompanying "timequake", with a magnitude proportional to the incursion's effects. Time travelers try to minimize their effects by replacing those they abduct with organically grown copies. This is the source of the co-pilot's comment about the passenger's being burned; the copies have been pre-burned in preparation for the crash.

In 1963, a time traveler on 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 discoveries made by Smith and Mayer might change history, Louise Baltimore travels back to 1989 to discourage Bill Smith from pursuing his investigation. She gains Bill's trust and seduces him into a one-night stand, which she hopes will distract him. Louise becomes pregnant as a result of this encounter. Over time, Bill becomes suspicious and visits Dr. Mayer. Louise materializes from the future and reveals her mission to them, in the hope that they will voluntarily keep the secret. Mayer accidentally kills himself with the stun weapon.

Mayer was instrumental in the development of the Gate technology that made time travel possible; his death results in an unsolvable paradox—a force infinity timequake—which will destroy the entire civilization of the future timeline. 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.

Bill and Louise step through the Gate and disappear. As an explosion destroys the Gate and the blast wave engulfs him, Sherman the Robot, who advised Louise frequently, quotes Winston Churchill: "This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning."

Cast

Production
"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."

Millennium writer John Varley.[2]

Millennium took 10 years to reach the screen. One director initially attached was visual effects designer Douglas Trumbull; Paul Newman and Jane Fonda were proposed to play the leads. MGM was attached to make the film; they also had Trumbull's Brainstorm in production at the time. The death of Brainstorm's leading lady Natalie Wood led to MGM briefly pulling the plug on said film and thus halted production on Millennium due to Trumbull's involvement. The role of director then passed to Richard Rush, Alvin Rakoff, and Phillip Borsos, before Michael Anderson, best known for 1956's Oscar-winning Around the World in 80 Days, stepped in.[3] Millennium's production designer, Gene Rudolf, had to produce a future setting that implied putrefaction and atrophy.

The largest set was the time-travel center for Louise Baltimore's operation. Rudolf created rusted catwalks that traversed a large open space. Buildings crumbled and exposed their infrastructures. The walls were painted dull green, black and coppery. Rudolf wanted the future to look dirty, sick and poisoned.

Several scenes are set in the vault for the decrepit council members overseeing the time travel operation. Rudolf designed their chamber as a semicircle of seven transparent, upright cylinders, each serving as a life-support device. Four of the cylinders held actors. The others were filled with bodily organ props and medical equipment that served as the last still living remnants of these members.

To create the time-travel effects of the Gate itself, cinematographer René Ohashi produced the ghostly shimmering lights by spinning metal wheels covered in Mylar.

Since actual aircraft could not be sent through the set, miniature models and a full-size mock-up of the tail-section of a Boeing 707 were used. Optical effects were used to make the planes look as if they were entering the set.

The penultimate scene took place in a contemporary American home. Rudolf's set was dominated by large horizontal windows. The room was filled with clocks, hourglasses and navigational equipment, in line with Dr. Arnold Mayer's fascination with time travel.

The scenes shot in the airport terminal buildings were actually shot at Toronto Lester B. Pearson International Airport, in the former Terminals 1 & 2. For the outdoor shot where Baltimore (Ladd) steals the car, two-way traffic was run in front of the Terminal 2 arrivals level where it is ordinarily a one-way road.

Reception

As of January 31, 2018, the film holds an 11% rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.[4]

Alternate endings

The original North American theatrical and VHS release of the film features a close-up of Sherman as the gate explodes, followed by a shot of the sun rising over clouds.

The International theatrical release features a much wider shot of the gate's explosion, followed by a wormhole/time portal effect. The scene then dissolves into an underwater shot of the two main characters swimming from above, followed by a view of the characters in a nude, Eden-esque embrace.

The 1999 North American DVD release contains the International version of the ending. The simpler North American version can also be found on the DVD as a bonus feature on the last page of the Production Notes, as well as is the one featured on Netflix.

Home media

In February 2016, the film was released on Blu-ray by Shout! Factory in a double feature with R.O.T.O.R.[5]

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References
  1. "Millennium". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved October 22, 2016.
  2. Interview in St. Louis Post-Dispatch Monday, July 20, 1992
  3. Varley, John (2004) The John Varley Reader New York: Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
  4. Rotten Tomatoes, "Millennium (1989)". Accessed July 24, 2014.
  5. "Millennium/R.O.T.O.R. (Double Feature)". Shout! Factory. Retrieved June 25, 2019.
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