If you were reading Starlog in the late ’80s, Millennium looked like the one to watch. It had time travel, air disasters, paradoxes, and future people trying to fix their civilization. It was supposed to be the thinking man’s mid-budget blockbuster.
But 1989 had other plans. That summer dropped Batman, The Last Crusade, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, UHF, The Abyss, Licence to Kill, Star Trek V, Ghostbusters II, and Lethal Weapon 2 – all in a single, incredible stretch. Millennium didn’t stand a chance.
But truth be told, its proper place was on late-night cable, the corner of the rental shelf, or maybe even blindly taped-off-pay-TV over mom’s soaps on an unlabelled TDK tape. This is a movie that got tucked away, lost in time, and just waited for us sci-fi nerds to discover it in time.
What still makes it a fun watch is the high-concept ambition. It loses the plot occasionally, but it knows it’s sitting on some great ideas, and it hopes you’re up for the ride… in spite of a bit of turbulence.
This one was for the patient bottom shelf-raiders.
The ones who find joy in picking a movie they never heard of just because the cover looked interesting. The ones who stay up too late. The ones who don’t need a movie to be great, just interesting.
That’s where Millennium exists. In one of those forgotten little pockets of time between the big blockbuster events of 1989. -Pop