Much like Freejack, the 1989 science fiction film Millennium was also about time traveler who snatch people from the past who are destined to die. In Freejack's case it was a racing driver from a car crash but with Millennium it's plane crash victims who are saved to repopulate an environmentally ravaged future. But the different in approach to their stories couldn't be more different.
Where Freejack wants to swim in the same waters as Total Recall, Millennium is stuck in it's own time warp. It's directed by Michael Anderson with all the drab visual flair of a late 1970's TV movie, the visual effects of an mid-1980's TV movie while the cyber punk landscape of the future Earth is at least up to date for when the film was made. The past its sell by date feeling isn't helped with the casting of 70's icon Kris Kristofferson and Charlies Angels babe Cheryl Ladd, both fine actors to be sure, but actors who carry onscreen baggage tieing them to a particular era.
Fortunately this is intelligent stuff exploring fate verses freewill, the complexities of temporal time travel and mans inability to control the nature order of things. It's unfortunate that it's obvious that Millennium is derived from a short story as the script feels particularly padded in places (especially in the romantic middle act) plus much of the dialogue is leaden and corny. But it does maintain the interest thanks to a structure that recalls Back To The Future Part II with time travel observed from the time travellers point of view, allowing us to see the same event from diffent perspectives.
Millennium would probably have worked better with a shorter running time as part of a science fiction anthology such as The Outer Limits but, despite its problems, it's still great to see proper, hard core science fiction movies.
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