HotToastyRag I know the premise on Imdb will sound irresistible to you: "A modern aircraft carrier is thrown back in time to 1941 near Hawaii, just hours before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor." It did to me, too-that's why I rented The Final Countdown! However, you can feel free to save your time and skip this one. It's utterly pointless.The exposition is very exciting, and I found my heart was literally racing for the first twenty minutes. Martin Sheen comes aboard the gigantic ship and meets Captain Kirk Douglas and his crew. Once they're in the middle of the ocean, an electric storm surrounds them and they travel back in time. I'm deathly afraid of shipwrecks, drowning, and any other danger involving water, so that's probably why I was so frightened during the opening scenes. However, the rest of the movie is incredibly boring. It takes a ridiculously long time for the characters to even figure out what's happened to them, and what they decide to do about it will most likely infuriate you. Usually, when everyone in the cast gives wonderful performances, I give credit to the director, who obviously had a magic touch with his actors. In the case of The Final Countdown, I feel forced to blame the director. The cast is clueless, low-key, and acts like they're participating in a dress rehearsal. Katharine Ross's performance made me want to throw something at the television set. She sees a dead body: "Oh, no. . ." She finds her dog she thought had drowned: "Oh, Charlie. . ." I strongly considered the possibility she'd been given a valium before the take, but I won't ask you to sit through the movie to ask if you agree. If the acting or story doesn't make you cringe, John Scott's outrageously epic music will. Watch The Fifth Missile instead; it's much better.

Fluke_Skywalker This film features a rather intriguing premise; what would happen if a modern (circa 1980) aircraft carrier were to be transported back in time to Pearl Harbor on December 6th, 1941? The how and the why of this is given almost no focus, so you really just have to shrug it off and go with it.'The Final Countdown' is at its best when the principles are debating the "Should we or shouldn't we" of attempting to thwart the attack. Unfortunately that aspect is given too little focus, robbing the third act of its drama. It's still a relatively entertaining film, boosted significantly by stars Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen.

BA_Harrison The Final Countdown takes what would have made for a very entertaining Twilight Zone episode and manages to turn it into a surprisingly effective full length feature, one that poses that old scientific dilemma: if you had the power to prevent a catastrophe in the past, would you do so, knowing full well that the future would be irrevocably altered in the process?Kirk Douglas, as aircraft carrier captain Matthew Yelland, is faced with precisely this decision after he and his crew travel through a time portal on their vessel, arriving on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour during WWII. With modern planes and missiles at their disposal, should they intercept the enemy or let history take its course?With a superb cast (Charles Durning, Martin Sheen, James Farentino, Katherine Ross), an intelligent script, and a real aircraft carrier and its jets at his disposal, director Don Taylor delivers a thoroughly absorbing tale that offers both exciting action (the flying scenes are wonderful—who needs CGI when you have the real deal?) and intense drama.While those expecting an action packed battle between modern jets and Japanese fighter planes will undoubtedly feel a little cheated by the film's less than spectacular denouement, which solves Yelland's awkward problem with the introduction of a second very timely time portal, the fun twist ending should leave most viewers with a big grin on their face.

Coventry My sincerest apologies for the inevitable song lyrics in the comment's subject line, but one simply cannot resist secretly singing the cheesy rock-classic by Europe when reading the words "final" and "countdown". The film is hardly to blame for this, though, as it predates the song with at least five years. Anyways, "The Final Countdown" is a movie that I had laying around on DVD for several years already, but I always delayed my viewing due to the incredibly grotesque and implausible time-traveling plot description. I need to be in a certain light-headed and tolerant mood to watch a film about an entire aircraft carrier (we're talking about a massive warship with a full-length flight deck here) that gets sucked trough a time-warp and ends up near Pearl Harbor on the 6th of December 1941, merely hours before the Japanese surprise attack that led the United Stated into World War II. Before properly realizing – and believing – what exactly happened, Captain Yelland and his crew have to decide whether or not they will prevent the attack and thus drastically alter the course of history. Admittedly, the elaboration of this crazed concept was a lot more realistic and compelling than I expected, but it does of course remain a hypothetical Sci-Fi movie. The script obviously features paradoxes that are big enough to fit a few more aircraft carriers and the climax *** additional spoiler alert *** is a rather cowardly letdown, since director Don Taylor and the four-headed crew of authors retreated from the change-history plot possibilities. Instead of coming up with a few courageous and innovative plot twists, they apparently preferred to use "The Final Countdown" as a publicity flick to promote the Navy! There's a lot of padding footage of planes taking off, cruising through the skies and landing on the impressive USS Nimitz. Perhaps the film crew was only allowed to use the ship if they included appealing and proudly patriotic images? The acting performances are – in sheer contrast to the plot – dead serious, straight-faced and very powerful. Kirk Douglas once more represents pure testosterone, while both Martin Sheen and James Farentino give away integer performances. There are also remarkable supportive roles for Charles Durning (as an ambitious 40's senator), Katherine Ross (as his secretary) and Soon-Tek Oh (as a confused Japanese fighter pilot).