"The Final Countdown" has a very interesting concept: take a modern day aircraft carrier, in the case, THE USS NIMITZ, and time warp it back to the eve of the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The possibilities would be endless; there, of course, would be no Japanese surprise attack on the morning of Dec. 7, as the NIMITZ would have known, in advance, of the attack scheme and taken counter-measures to combat it. Also, the history books, as we know them now, would have undergone some drastic mind-boggling changes. Time travel, and its supposed existence, has also been a fascinating subject for movies, and this film plays that angle to the hilt.
Kirk Douglas portrays Captain Yelland, the modern skipper of the aircraft carrier NIMITZ. On routine training mission outside Pearl Harbor, his command, and all the men, planes, equipment, etc., are mysteriously time-warped back to the same locality, but the date is December 6, 1941. Douglas,Martin Sheen, an expert from the Defense Dept., the other members of the crew, James Farentino, who is a Pearl Harbor historian as well as being a wing commander of a group of jet fighters, begin to realize the infinite possibilities of what they could do by stopping the Japanese attack in its early stages. However, they do encounter some 1941 era people, Katherine Ross, a secretary to a Senator Sam Chapman, played by Charles Durning. According to the history, as Farentino recounts it, Sen. Chapman disappears mysteriously during the attack, and would have been in line for the vice-presidency under FDR. Other matters complicate Captain Yelland's decision regarding the situation, and at the moment when matters could not get worse, the mysterious time-warp cloud is on the horizon in the path of the NIMITZ, and heading straight at them.
Sci-fi at one of its better moments, a solid 8/10
Kirk Douglas portrays Captain Yelland, the modern skipper of the aircraft carrier NIMITZ. On routine training mission outside Pearl Harbor, his command, and all the men, planes, equipment, etc., are mysteriously time-warped back to the same locality, but the date is December 6, 1941. Douglas,Martin Sheen, an expert from the Defense Dept., the other members of the crew, James Farentino, who is a Pearl Harbor historian as well as being a wing commander of a group of jet fighters, begin to realize the infinite possibilities of what they could do by stopping the Japanese attack in its early stages. However, they do encounter some 1941 era people, Katherine Ross, a secretary to a Senator Sam Chapman, played by Charles Durning. According to the history, as Farentino recounts it, Sen. Chapman disappears mysteriously during the attack, and would have been in line for the vice-presidency under FDR. Other matters complicate Captain Yelland's decision regarding the situation, and at the moment when matters could not get worse, the mysterious time-warp cloud is on the horizon in the path of the NIMITZ, and heading straight at them.
Sci-fi at one of its better moments, a solid 8/10