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Starring Artisian Entertainment. As you can see from the accompanying stills, there is now definitive proof that with future technological advancements do not come better hairstyling products. One major concern that I have with all fictional works that deal with time-travel, be they cinematic or literary, is how the loose ends are tied up. Time-travel, while it might prove interesting to try some time, seems, for the most part, to be a bigger hassle that just about anything else. If there's one lesson I've learned from reading Ray Bradbury and watching The Simpsons, it's that when traveling in time, the slightest action can, and usually does, gravely affect the future in ways previously thought impossible. So when John Varley tackled the idea of time-travel in his script for Millennium, I raised a wary eyebrow. However, instead of hoping things would just fall into place, or take care of themselves, Varley attacks the complex and paradoxical issues of time-travel head on, never leaving anything to chance. In the year 3,000, the earth's atmosphere is more polluted than the air over northwestern Indiana, and, as a result of this, its human inhabitants have been rendered sterile. In an effort to continue human existence, a crack team of soldiers, led by Cheryl Ladd, have begun traveling back in time to the 20th century, taking people about to die--normally from a soon to be crashing plane--and transporting them into the future, so they will procreate and save the species. All goes well with this drastic plan, until one of Ladd's team members gets shot by a would-be hijacker and mistakenly leaves her weapon behind on the plane. This would be a good time for me to verse those would-be time travelers reading this newspaper that leaving items from the future lying around in the past is probably number two on the list of things not to do when traveling in time, right behind wearing polyester bell-bottoms. Kris Kristofferson, playing the F.A.A. inspector in charge of investigating that particular plane crash, finds the stunner Ladd's soldier left behind and things begin to get interesting. The first half of Millennium is shot from Kristofferson's perspective, allowing the viewer to understand what is going on in his world in the year 1989, while also allowing the viewer to relive the excitement of the Cubs losing in the first round playoff series and the like, the camera rarely ever leaving his character. In the second half of the film, director Michael Anderson Sr. shifts the focus of the film off Kristofferson, and onto Ladd. As this shift occurs, the viewer is now able to see the events of the first half of the movie from Ladd's perspective. This shift enables us to understand all of the heretofore confusing elements of Ladd's behavior and lets us know why Ladd's character is who she is. However, unlike Quentin Tarantino's rather pointless changes of perspective in Jackie Brown, Anderson does a nice job of using differing motives, experiences, and camera angles to keep the second telling of the '89 events crisp and fresh. As you might be able to guess from its stars, Millennium is most modestly budgeted film, but this hardly hampers the final product. When a director has a script as solid as Varley's to work from, the end result will almost always be entertaining, regardless of the budget. And in the end, my apprehensions were unjustified, as Millennium turned out to be a strikingly well thought out, science-fiction film about time-travel that suffered only slightly from the injection of some pre-destruction of the universe sap.
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