Yesterday was Pearl Harbor Day, and more somber than usual due to the mass shooting a few days ago. I always like to watch this movie around this time of year. A little depressing in recent years since virtually all of the aircraft shown in the movie, once state of the art, are now retired, except for the venerable Hawkeye. I'm always amazed at how some people were confused by this movie. Knew another SF fan who for some reason thought Commander Owen assumed Tideman's identity in the past after he went back in time and the "real," different Tideman was in the limo at the beginning of the movie. Took some time to convince him that Tideman was nothing but a fiction Owen and Laurel came up with and didn't exist before 1941. All the foreshadowing was there right from the beginning of the movie. The reclusiveness. The trip to see Lasky - a low level employee he's never met face to face - off on what should have been just a routine job assignment but not showing his face. Delaying the Nimitz's departure two days until the time storm. Smart enough to be able to help design the Nimitz. One unusual notion came to me this year. Owen is stuck in 1941. James Farentino was born in 1938, so assuming characters are usually not the exact ages of the actors playing them, let's say Owen was born in 1942, about four years later. It would be interesting if the "Tidemans" were Owen's parents. Even more of a complete time loop if you are your own father. Captain Yelland did say that Owen had no family whatsoever. This could fit right in. The Tidemans have a son and leave him at an orphanage because that's how Owen remembers his childhood. Owen grew up in foster homes, so he never had any real family. As for the periodic calls from some fans for a remake, how about taking a page from the 1960 Twilight Zone episode "The Last Flight," where a WW I pilot found himself landing at a 1960 air base? The Enterprise (CVN-80) gets garbled radio chatter on unusual frequencies from a pilot lost in fog desperately trying to get a response from his carrier, the Enterprise, as he's low on fuel. They direct him in via radio and are surprised to see an F4F Wildcat landing on the deck, while the pilot finds he's not on the CV-6 he took off from. The different Enterprises confuse him and he eventually learns the truth about Pearl Harbor and WW II, maybe from a book (on a tablet or e-book reader) a crewman had brought to read. The argument becomes whether or not they can let him go back to his ship armed with that knowledge. He might even steal the tablet to show his superiors and escape with it, but by then the battery is dead and maybe the screen is shattered and nobody in 1941 has ever seen transistors, much less microelectronics, and they have no conception of lithium batteries, so they have no idea what that little slab is. It would be many decades before his son could reverse-engineer it and become an Musk or Jobs-like mogul. I'm sure it would be possible to shoehorn in a dogfight or two even in a story like that.
Yeah. It's frustrating to me that fiction has conditioned people to expect the nonsensical "rewriting" model of time travel and to consider the more physically and logically plausible fixed-loop model to be "wrong." The problem is that people insist on talking about what happened "before" and "after" the time travel without stepping back to consider that the very existence of time travel renders words like "before" and "after" purely subjective and no longer absolute. It's solipsistic to assume that the order in which the audience of a story perceives the events is the "real" chronology, even more so than the objective passage of time. That's like watching a video recording of a sporting event and believing it means the game is played a second time and can change. It can look to a time traveler (or to an audience viewing events from that time traveler's POV) that the event happens twice, that there are two versions of it "before" and "after" the time travel, but that's an illusion resulting from them looping back on their own past, like rewinding a tape. In reality it only happens the one time, with the time-travel event as part of it. Just because the characters and audience didn't know time travel was involved until afterward doesn't mean the time travel was "added" to the event. Anyway, yeah, The Final Countdown is an effective movie, in part because it does make effective use of the fixed-loop time travel model, making it one of the more plausible time-travel movies out there, allowing for the lack of explanation of the time warp. Although the other thing I mainly remember it for is its musical score, which was pretty good.
Yelland was going to massively alter our history by preventing the Japanese airstrike, nevermind by accelerating the development of 10000 other things like jet aircraft, radar, semiconductors, rockets, nuclear power .. so unlike Starfleet, I guess the USN doesn’t have a temporal prime directive (yet.) I have a friend that served on the John F. Kennedy in the 80s, he used to love pointing out all of the errors and technical mistakes in this movie.
A similar situation is explored in John Birmingham's Axis of Time series of books wherein a naval carrier task-force from 2021 gets dropped into the middle of the Battle of Midway by a quantum physics experiment gone bad. The crew USS Hilary Clinton (motto: "It takes a carrier.") and it's escorts massively change the course of history. They're fun books and worth a look if you like alternate history stories. As for The Final Countdown, it's one of my favorite films, and always enjoy the scene where the Tomcats get the order to "splash the zeroes". It's filmed beautifully, has a pretty decent soundtrack, and a good cast. Part of me has always wished that Nimitz would have made it to Pearl, but I'm sure this would have stressed the special effects budget a bit.
The Final Countdown had a plot out of the Twilight Zone. BTW, pilots flying off the U.S.S. Nimitz are said to have had an encounter with a "tic tac" UFO. Check out the Nimitz Encounters on YouTube.