This movie was a big production starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen and Katherine Ross. It was filmed mostly on the aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz and had aircraft such as the F-14 Tomcat flying on missions. For an airplane buff like me, it was enjoyable although there were some aircraft I didn't recognize which was frustrating. The script seemed to be written to showcase various carrier operations such as aerial refueling* and putting up an E-2 Hawkeye radar plane to see what's going on around them. I enjoyed that.
And it was a science fiction movie. Really.
SPOILERS if you haven't seen the movie.
The Nimitz and its crew and aircraft and weapons and everything are sent back in time to December 6, 1941 due to a bizarre storm. There's no explanation of how or why the 1,000-foot long ship is suddenly taken back in time to a crucial spot in U.S. history other than the storm. It takes a while for the captain (Douglas) to figure it all out but then there's a dilemma. A single modern aircraft carrier could have stopped the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor easily. (Could have sank the whole Japanese fleet but they never discussed that possibility.) Should they stop the attack? Should they change history?
At the end, the captain decides to, yes, stop the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and launches F-14s and other planes to do that. I think the filmmakers wanted to show as many planes being launched as possible because some of the planes didn't look like combat aircraft.
But then, just before they are about to attack the Japanese planes, the bizarre storm comes back and they are all taken back to 1980, including the planes not on the carrier. Sort of a cop-out ending if you ask me.
They reused footage from the 1970 movie Tora Tora Tora for the attack on Pearl Harbor.
And, yes, the special effects were cheesy (lasers and smoke).
For "let's make a movie on an aircraft carrier" it was great if you like airplanes and military stuff (and I do). For science fiction, it was dumb. They had this opportunity to film on a real aircraft carrier and they ruined it with a stupid science fiction plot. In 1980, it was the height of the Cold War (there was actually a Russian "trawler" spy boat in the movie). Couldn't they have come up with, oh, a plot about Soviet spies or the possibility of a shooting war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union? No, they did a dumb time travel story.
Have you seen The Final Countdown? What did you think of it. Let me know in the comments below.
The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.
*The refueling in the movie was done by a variant of the A-6 Intruder. But since the Navy no longer flies the A-6 nor its variants, I wondered if there was a way to do aerial refueling now. According to Google, now the Navy uses "buddy refueling" where one F/A-18 Super Hornet with extra fuel tanks will refuel another F/A-18. And, according to Google, the Navy is developing the MQ-25 Stingray: This upcoming drone is designed to be the first dedicated carrier-based aerial refueling aircraft. It will allow F/A-18s to focus on combat missions rather than acting as tankers.
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