[.ca] Millennium (Widescreen) (ISBN 0784011338)

From Amazon.com:
Time-hoppers from the future, led by Cheryl Ladd, are abducting airline passengers about to crash, and transporting them a millennium hence in order to reseed a future blighted by environmental disaster. This is a dangerous business, plagued by the specter of accidentally creating time paradoxes, which could throw the future out of whack. Unfortunately, they've lost a couple of the stunners they use to subdue troublesome passengers, and these fall into the hands of a curious physicist (Daniel J. Travanti) and an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board (Kris Kristofferson). Cheryl Ladd must retrieve these devices before a time paradox wipes out her world, but manages to complicate things by developing a romance with Kristofferson. All of which is very intriguing, having come from the short story, "Air Raid," by science fiction luminary John Varley, who also is credited with the screenplay. The part about airline abductions to save the disastrous future is straight from the original story, and the rest is expanded (you wouldn't say extrapolated) from it. The results are not very happy. About a third of the film is maddeningly wasted by repeating action from a different point of view. Seems natural when there are disparate timelines to deal with, but here nothing is added by the conceit. Only Travanti turns in a creditable performance as the physicist, bent on proving his theories about the future. He seems hungry for discovery, which is one of the things you want from a science fiction story, that sense of awe. But here it's just, "Aw, shucks!" --Jim Gay

Not a famous film for good reason:
How many movies do you know that replay the same scenes and can still hold the interest of the viewer? Not many, if any. However, the creators of Millennium decided that about one third of the movie should be the same scenes. Total failure. This is a case where the makers of the film underestimated the intelligence of the viewers, thinking that going through the movie twice was the only way viewers could keep track of the incredibly difficult concept of time travel. Then again, if this was truly a good movie than we shouldn't be disappointed in seeing the scenes twice, since we could then enjoy good acting etc. Not so in Millennium. Kris Kristofferson looks grizzly with a heavy beard and has the skin tone of beef jerky. Cheryl Ladd plays opposite of Kristofferson as the time traveling tough women from the future who happens to know nothing about time traveling, she needs a personal robot to explain "the obvious" to her on many occasions. Maybe she forgot to read the script. In this movie, the future is a place of rust, the present is a place of ignorance, and the viewer is left insulted.

Sherman, send the gate:
We are medially confronted with a midair plain crash. In the confusion the navigator goes back into the cabin and is horrified by something. All we see is a staring device sliding along the floor "MILLENNIUM". Bill Smith investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board (Kris Kristofferson) is dispatched to the crash scene. he must make since of things that do not add up to a normal crash. Meanwhile he is being asked about the anomalies by a physicist (Daniel J. Travanti) that seems to know moiré than he is letting on. And to make things more complicated he is being sidetracked by a female airline employee (Cheryl Ladd) that does not seem to do everything from driving to eating awkwardly. Bill wonders if he is tired, paranoid or is there something that is just not normal? The music and filming remind me of a Hallmark romance movie which just happens to have a sci-fi background.

Millennium is a thinking man's scifi flick:
This movie is actually better than what others might think. But it requires your complete attention, and for a generation of people who are used to in-your-face MTV type short-attention span stuff, then skip this flick. However, I have shown this DVD on several occasions to groups of friends, and everyone enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on, and were surprised as I was, when time - travel was implicated. Cheryl Ladd was quite good as a cynical flight attendant, and Kris Kristofferson was believable as a man burned out on his job. I only with Travanti had more to do. Still, I highly recommend this flick to people who like to think when they watch a scifi flick.

MST3K would have had a field day with this!:
This movie is *bad*. The "plot" makes no sense, and the ending even less. It is stupid, slow, insipid, and utterny nonsensical. I wish that MST3K had gotten ahold of this film; only they could have mocked it the way it so desperately deserves to be mocked. This movie is *that bad*. And it's *boring*, too. Kristoferson and Ladd have absolutely ZERO chemistry. No, in fact, they have NEGATIVE chemistry. Kristoferson couldn't act is way out of this script, and Ladd ... well, jeez, what could one expect from an ex-Charlie's Angel? It's also *ugly*. The costumes, set designs, and special effects would have been bad in 1989, and haven't aged well. Post-apocolyptic futures can look cool (ROAD WARRIOR) or even funky (12 MONKEYS), but here, it's just lame. And the first "effect" in the film--where two planes collide--is a sad effort of blue-screening that my high-school film club could have outdone. Avoid at all costs. Waste no money. If your boyfriend or girlfriend owns it, break up with them; it will be less painful. I have to go sanitize my home theatre now.

Interesting to a Point -- a Twilight Zone story w/o the feel:
You've read the "official" review and to be honest, I don't wholly agree or disagree. First, I like both Kristopherson's and Ladd's performances. They fit the characters nicely. The replay of the same sequence from another angle answers all of the questions about what is going on, and is the only thing that turns a rather short, straightforward featurette into a full-length feature. Conceivably, more time could have been spent investigating the wreckage (and similar wreckages) before revealing the time travelers from the future. Also, why don't they fix these ripples, instead of trying to escape them? So there are some questions. If I could, I'd give this one 2-1/2 stars, not three, but I won't drop it all the way to two, mostly because no one else has done this exact story, unless it was Rod Serling in the original Twilight Zone series, but I don't think so... there are similar stories, to be sure, and time travel stories, but not in this combination. Which puts this film into the "Twilight Zone" category for me. There are so many places where they could have made this one better, I have to wonder why no one has done a remake... Still, it is part of my collection and if you are SF buff, then don't leave this off your list of films to consider without at least watching it.