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“Science fiction” is an oxymoron. While watching “The Empire Strikes Back”, I spent 20 minutes trying to understand why they were always able to breathe the air during the places they landed on. This riddle earned me 50 letters – half explaining logic and the other arguing why logic doesn’t matter in a Star Wars movie. It would seem to matter less in “The Final Countdown,” where an aircraft carrier, the Nimitz, strays into a vortex and travels back in time to 40 years before Pearl Harbor was attacked. The idea, at first glance, is appealing. A nuclear powered carrier fully loaded with jet warplanes floating directly above Perl and knowing the Japanese attack plans. Sadly, the movie is so overcomplicated that the most interesting aspect was the carrier itself. The film’s stunning Navy cooperation allowed the carrier to be featured in detail on film.
The story is one that should be completely disregarded. It features the Nimitz sailing through peaceful waters get the sudden appearance of a giant whirlpool in the sky. This whirlpool is said to be a time portal, but looks more like a discarded beta version of Disney’s “The Black Hole.” The ship is thrown back into 1940 and is able to change history forever. Does it annihilate the Japanese air fleet? Of course not. In the future that the Nimitz was throw from, the ship didn’t destroy the fleet. Irrespective, at the exact moment of destruction, a different whirlpool sends the Nimitz back into 1980, but this time with two people missing.
And this creates an unresolvable problem with time travel. If, say, a chap from 1980 gets in a time machine and travels 40 years back in time and then lives an additional 40 years, does he get to have an encounter with himself? Almost happens in the movie. An old man who, as a young man, went on a cruise, got time shifted to a desert island, spent 40 years there, and finally arrived in a limousine to bid farewell to the ship that set sail on its doomed 1980 cruise. To add to the excitement, a mysterious limousine appears out of nowhere as the Nimitz is setting sail on its cruise. My oh my, what a splendid imagination.
But wait a minute. So does that imply the same man is at the dock before and after the event and time? By my calculations that gives two different physical bodies to a single person. Now, that surely defies everything they taught us in high school physics.
Let’s say I buy the paradox. That still leaves me with other problems. For instance, Nimitz commander Kirk Douglas orders an airstrike against the Japanese Air Force. . . then he cancels it at the last possible moment as the Nimitz is coming back into the second whirlpool. Why does he change his mind and cancel? Is he too reluctant to play God? Who knows and he doesn’t say. I can conceive of a good reason to call the planes back; they would be left along the Pacific Ocean with no land to call home when the Nimitz is yanked back to 1980. The film avoids all sorts of basic issues like this, and unfortunately, it is so slow that, sadly, we have enough time to think about them.
Nevertheless, the shots on the carrier look good. There’s an intriguing idea of life aboard the ship, and I enjoy numerous takeoffs and even an emergency landing. This is the type of films, I think, some children would like – modern technology, special effects, and action packed. It is entertaining, yet nonsensical at the same time. There is no cleverness to enjoy the time travel contradictions like “Time After Time” did. It moves forward, backwards, or undetermined to a particular region.
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