Conference bookie::movies

    Ever read the book? Not only was the movie moderatly bad, but it took
    out so much that was relevant in the book that it just made me shake my
    head and wonder about the judgement of whoever makes the editing
    decisions......
    
    MBH

    I read the short story that both book and movie were based on, but it
    was so long ago that I didn't remember enough details to generate lots
    of book-vs-movie criticism. Heck, there was plenty to go on with the
    film alone! [By the by, I did like Travanti's obsessed-professor
    character. The whole lost-artifacts subplot could make a dandy
    modern-day "Call of Cthulhu" scenario... "The Twonky from Out of
    Space-Time", eh?]
    
    -b

The opening credits note that John Varley wrote the screenplay from his
own short story, "Air Raid."  I'm guessing that the novel came later.
I read only the novel, a mediocre book that stifles some interesting ideas
under a clutter of other plot devices.
"Temporal censorship" is a good example.  You can only look at or vist
any one point in time once, ever.  If you can't look at something now,
maybe you will be able to later.  The ending of the book rationalizes
this concept better than the movie does.

I suspect one factor that makes this movie so bad is its attempt to move 
Cheryl Ladd out of her typecasting as a sweet young thing.
Think of Joan Jett in that role (if you prefer to cast to type instead 
of away from it).

- tom]

    This was another example of a very good short story which should have
    been left as one. Varley's story "Air Raid" was fast-paced, gritty, and
    had a great impact. Unfortunately, he decided to stretch it into a
    full-length novel; not sure whether the movie came before or after the
    book, but it was a still more watered-down version of the book.
    
    One side benefit of Millenium was that it gave John Varley exposure to
    the movie industry. He then took those themes, and worked them quite
    nicely into the book "Demon", third of his wonderful "Titan" trilogy.
    
    A few years ago, I was flying on a DC-9 a few rows in front of an
    off-duty pilot, and noticed he was reading "Millenium". Considering
    that the book's plot revolves around major air crashes, I couldn't help
    but feel a bit unsettled!
    
    Mild spoilers:
    
    There was a lot going on in the book that did not come out in the
    movie. For instance, the raiders from the future were so used to high
    air pollution levels that they would smoke three or four cigarrettes
    simultaneously when they visited the 20th century. Also, the reason why
    they raided the present for people was that the leprosy-like condition
    that afflicted virtually all of their population was the result of a
    particularly nasty form of biological warfare some generations past, in
    which the diseases bonded with the DNA and were passed to subsequent
    generations.
    
    To be fair, the movie did an okay job of trying to portray what was in
    the book, and stayed pretty faithful to its plot. Still, most of the
    impact could be found in "Air Raid". In extending it to a book, the
    drama was stretched thin, and Varley watered down some of the tragedy
    of the story by choosing to spare his heroine. Also, some pretty
    literal deus ex machina was introduced in the book's ending, that we
    could have done without.

    
    I thought it was a good looking plane crash right at the start.
    Would've made an interesting in-flight movie during its release...