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Millennium. check out website: www.carltonvisual.com
It isn’t difficult to count on one hand, SF stories turned into films from live Science Fiction writers, let alone do their own screenplays. The premise of short story, novel and film is that if you want to populate the future from the past, you take people from where they won’t be missed, namely off crashing aircraft. Here, the problems arise when a future stunner weapon is left on board and a crash inspector and a physicist put together the puzzle of what it means.
Of the cast, Cherryl Ladd as Louise Baltimore from the future is both eye-catching and gives an interesting performance, especially when she forgets where she is. The scene in the dining room where she bites into an apple from the core end or throwing a burning cigarette out into the room expecting it to be laser-zapped is priceless. I tend to see Kristofferson as a somewhat flat actor and it’s very hard to tell if he’s supposed to be over-tired as his part, Bill Smith, or sleep-walking the role but he lacks vitality and charisma. The future is somewhat beautifully set. At the time it was filmed, this was Canada’s biggest studio and you can see what the space was used for in bringing a whole aeroplane there to remove the passengers. It’s a shame that the depiction of the future affected by an earlier time paradox was shown to just explode rather than change radically into something worse than it is, which is a heavily polluted world falling apart. Whether this was director Michael Anderson’s concession to having something spectacular happen at the end or not is debatable but this reviewer thinks it could have been done better. This is also the first time that I’ve seen this film in widescreen. Never having flown by aeroplane, I tend to take it for granted when I saw it on video that hushed tones was the norm in flight or, at least, the seats absorbed the sound. At least this time, I could see a little of the ‘passengers’ although it would have been helpful had we seen what the navigator saw to enforce his reality. Undoubtedly, ‘Millennium’ will end up on the cheapie shelves within a few short months and is just as likely not to have a further DVD pressing, so if you are after this film, I wouldn’t hang around. GF Willmetts
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OTHER REVIEWS - May 2004
Non Fiction Mythology: The DC Comics Art Of Alex Ross Futures: 50 Years In Space The Challenge Of The Stars by David A. Hardy and Patrick Moore Lyra’s Oxford by Philip Pullman Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon: Second Edition by Brian Roseberry DVDs Babylon 5: The Complete First Season: Signs and Portents Fantasy Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson The Siege Of Mithila by Ashok K. Banker Broken Crescent by S. Andrew Swann The Magician’s Guild by Trudi Canavan The Destroyer Goddess by Laura Resnick The Weavers Of Saramyr by Chris Wooding The Iron Grail by Robert Holdstock Faerie Tales edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davies Darknesses by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. Slipstream Changing Of Faces by Tim Lebbon Karloff’s Circus by Steve Aylett The Well Of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde Science Fiction The Golden Globe by John Varley Market Forces by Richard Morgan It Came From Outer Space screenplay by Ray Bradbury A Gift Of Dragons by Anne McCaffrey Different Kinds Of Darkness by David Langford Felaheen The Third Arabesk by Jon Courtenay Grimwood Absolution Gap by Adrian Reynolds The Line Of Polity by Neal Asher The Affinity Trap by Martin Sketchley Natural History by Justina Robson Horror Living Dead In Dallas by Charlaine Harris Magazines
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With
absolutely no trimmings other than language adjusters, with a low
price, the DVD version of this 1989 film based on John Varley’s
short story ‘Air Raid’, scriptwrote and novelised by said author
has come onto the market.
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