No, this has nothing to do with the hit song by the rock band Europe. For an old naval action, time travel film from 1980, The Final Countdown has aged very well. In the movie, the USS Nimitz flagship aircraft carrier gets caught in a wormhole and travels back in time to World War II before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Like Top Gun, the movie features real aerial combat sequences with F-14 Tomcat fighter jets, except The Final Countdown came out years before the Tom Cruise movie. Released a year after Apocalypse Now, The Final Countdown stars Martin Sheen and Kirk Douglas, supplemented by some real-life navy crewmen as cast members.
The Final Countdown was kind of ahead of its time (no pun intended), raising questions about time travel a few years before The Terminator. Unlike most other time travel films, there's an interesting scene that tries to explain the plausibility of the phenomenon.
There are not that many movies that take place almost entirely aboard an aircraft carrier. Unlike Crimson Tide, The Final Countdown got full support from the U.S. Navy, so the production crew had impressive access to shooting the interiors of the USS Nimitz and some of the Navy's aircrafts.
When I was a little boy, The Final Countdown was one of the few "grown-up" movies I got to see, and it blew me away the first time I saw it. It's still a cool ass movie today, and of all the films about the U.S. military and time travel, The Final Countdown is one of the most underappreciated.
Comments
Post a Comment