***
This movie about time travel has its own peculiar timeline. Evidently author John Varley based a screenplay on his short story "Air Raid" then wrote a novel based on the screenplay, fixing it so that the movie is technically based on the story while the events of the film in fact mirror those in the novel. So perhaps it's fair to say that this film is not a poor adaptation of the book, but that the book is an excellent adaptation of the film. Either way, of the three -- story, book, and film -- the movie is the least entertaining. That said, this is an okay adventure about what happens when a woman from the future whose job it is to snatch passengers from doomed airliners meets the NTSB man investigating the mid-air collision of two passenger jets. When a weapon from the future is lost aboard one of the jets, it sets up a potential paradox that could -- not to put too fine a point on it -- destroy all humanity. It's this story, with its shifts in point of view from the man (Kris Kristofferson) to the woman (Cheryl Ladd), that keeps the movie interesting; everything else just holds it back. Michael Anderson proves that the triumph of Logan's Run was in its production design rather than his direction, while production designer Rene Ohashi probably wished he had a bunch of pretty domes to create rather than an ugly, claustrophobic world of dying men, women, and human-machine hybrids. Then, too, both Kristofferson and Ladd do their part to keep this vehicle strictly in the middle of the road. Ripe for an expensive remake, based on the book.
This movie about time travel has its own peculiar timeline. Evidently author John Varley based a screenplay on his short story "Air Raid" then wrote a novel based on the screenplay, fixing it so that the movie is technically based on the story while the events of the film in fact mirror those in the novel. So perhaps it's fair to say that this film is not a poor adaptation of the book, but that the book is an excellent adaptation of the film. Either way, of the three -- story, book, and film -- the movie is the least entertaining. That said, this is an okay adventure about what happens when a woman from the future whose job it is to snatch passengers from doomed airliners meets the NTSB man investigating the mid-air collision of two passenger jets. When a weapon from the future is lost aboard one of the jets, it sets up a potential paradox that could -- not to put too fine a point on it -- destroy all humanity. It's this story, with its shifts in point of view from the man (Kris Kristofferson) to the woman (Cheryl Ladd), that keeps the movie interesting; everything else just holds it back. Michael Anderson proves that the triumph of Logan's Run was in its production design rather than his direction, while production designer Rene Ohashi probably wished he had a bunch of pretty domes to create rather than an ugly, claustrophobic world of dying men, women, and human-machine hybrids. Then, too, both Kristofferson and Ladd do their part to keep this vehicle strictly in the middle of the road. Ripe for an expensive remake, based on the book.
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