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| this is a movie about Cheryl Ladd's hair |
Watched: 01/30/2026
Format: YouTube
Viewing: Second
Director: Michael Anderson
So, in 1989, I was 14 and just started high school. During the summer, at B. Dalton I'd picked up some Starlog-type magazine that had gone all-in on how we should all go see Millennium (1989) upon its release. I knew who Kris Kristofferson was (I'm from Texas, he's from Brownsville), but not Cheryl Ladd, who was coming off a run of TV shows, etc... that I didn't watch. She was a thing, but not so much of a thing to those of us exiting middle-school.
The magazine pitched the movie as a dystopian sci-fi epic with a robot, and, hey... I was sold.
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| flight attendant hair |
Also, in high school one meets new people, and free from the shackles of knowing me in middle school, a lovely girl and I met, and decided to go on "a date". What I now get in 2026 that I did not get in 1989: I guess this girl really wanted to go out with me, because there was no way in hell she wanted to see this dumb-ass movie.*
Anyway, I didn't really remember the movie because (a) it was an impossibly long time ago, (b) I was distracted by interpreting every movement of the girl trying to figure out if she liked me, not figuring out she was on a date with me and at Millennium, and (c) this movie is impossibly boring and I would guess my brain shut off at some point.
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| makes you wonder when big-hair is coming back hair |
I guess - if someone were to say to me that they were going to make a time-travel movie, I'd insist they watch this one to see "there are good ways to do this, incredibly boring ways to do this and confusing ways to do this, and this movie features all of them, but is mostly boring."
Our plot: Kristofferson plays a flight crash investigator who is overworked and world-weary. I guess in this world planes are dropping out of the sky non-stop. Following a crash outside of Minneapolis, he meets a sexy flight attendant (Chery Ladd) who beds him. When he goes back to his room 15 seconds after departing, she's vanished.
Later that night he is checking on the wreckage and Cheryl Ladd shows up, but as if she's never seen him before, and looking like she fell out of an issue of Heavy Metal.
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| I mean, THIS IS SCI-FI, people |
We're taken 1000 years into the future where things are going poorly for humanity. Like, everyone is wretched, we've lost the ability to reproduce, and no one wears colors anymore. Also, there are smart-alecky robots.
Turns out humanity is now going to the past and swapping out the passengers of doomed flights with corpses so they can steal those people and start breeding humans again?
Or something.
Anyway, the thing this movie does is spend an inordinate amount of time showing Kris Kristofferson going on a date with Cheryl Ladd, and then shows it all over again from different angles. It is absolutely insane. I have never wanted to punch an editor before, but here we are. All we needed to see was the start and end of that interaction, and I think we could have easily trimmed 15 minutes off of this movie. We never needed to see them actually falling in love - we get it.
There's supposed to be some heavy philosophy here about time travel, destiny, etc... and it's all nonsense. But it is fun to see the Timequakes. And I like Chery Ladd's hair in its myriad styles throughout the movie.
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| morning after/ pre-walk-of-shame hair |
The stuff that works is the "oh, yeah, just go back before and figure it out - we're time-travelling" ideas that made time travel a fun concept. What's confusing is after they show an entire date twice, they just skip over the part where Kristofferson saw Ladd in the hanger in her future-suit. Like, I am unsure if anything changed or if we needed more information... like that was the scene to see twice.
For reasons I don't know or weren't explained, all of the humans are named after cities, giving Cheryl Ladd's character the rad-as-hell name of " Louise Baltimore".
The magazine had assured me I'd love the robot in this movie. He was, at best, fine.
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| Sherman the robot and half-human, half-Dark Crystal pod person who has had his essence drained |
Anyway, I kinda hated this movie watching it again. It has really cool sets and ideas in the future section, but the movie would rather do dumb things in the present like suggest that Cheryl Ladd would rather steal a car she doesn't know how to drive than just let Kristofferson take his car.
Does this movie have anything to say beyond timey-wimey nonsense? I am unsure. It wasn't weird to suggest humanity was not going to end well back in the 80's. And the notion that we're going to properly restart humanity with a bunch of yuppies from the 80's is kinda hilarious.
I think this movie has a fanbase. I am not it. Just a fan of Cheryl Ladd's hair.
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| 80's requisite shower sequence hair |
*it did not work out, alas. I hope she's well.
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