The Final Countdown (1980)

The Final Countdown arrives from 1980 with the bearing of a film that has no interest in being asked what it means. A nuclear carrier, the USS Nimitz, sails into a storm and surfaces in December of 1941, hours before the Japanese fleet strikes Pearl Harbor. Kirk Douglas commands. Martin Sheen observes. Katharine Ross survives a sinking yacht. The picture spends its first hour as a documentary about flight deck operations, which is fortunate, because the story is mostly men staring at radar screens and concluding, repeatedly, that they have traveled through time.

The film declines to lecture. There is a Black commander, Owens, played by Ron O'Neal, and he is simply an officer doing his job, an amateur historian whose knowledge of the coming attack becomes a tactical asset. The Japanese pilots are combatants, not symbols. Ross has real screen time and no speech about her place in the world. A defense contractor's efficiency expert rides along as plot machinery, and nobody proposes that the military-industrial complex be dismantled. The film's one flirtation with altering the historical record resolves into a restoration of the timeline, so the past stays where the audience left it.

This is a picture about hardware and hesitation. The Navy lent its carrier, its jets, and its sailors, and the result plays like a recruitment brochure with a philosophical shrug. Roger Ebert gave it two stars and complained that the story made little sense, which is fair and also beside the point. Nothing here is pressed into service for a message. It is a time-travel thriller that refuses to tell us what to think about time travel, about Pearl Harbor, or about anything else. We are left with the vortex, the aircraft, and the distinct impression that the filmmakers regarded an argument as a failure of nerve.