A Tale of Two Time Machines
Apr. 27th, 2004 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jamesqA few weeks ago we had a wee little themed video night. Attending were yours truly (who supplied the DVD's), Gareth, Kris, Jason and Chantelle.
First up, The Final Countdown. This is a basic God is screwing with you, closed-loop time travel story. Attempts to change the past are thwarted, except for those which are revealed to have always been there.
The plot: Martin Sheen is sent by his superiors at Tideman Industries to go on a trip with the USS Nimitz. While there, he manages to piss off his bunk mate James Farentino, who's a flight leader and amateur Pearl Harbor historian. Captain Kirk Douglas and XO Ron O'Neal don't much like him either.
A few hours into their cruise, the ship is chased down by a storm of a type nobody's ever seen before. It makes everybody grasp their head in a classic-trek-actor-simulating-sonic-attack sort of way and then vanishes, leaving clear skies, blue waters and confused looks.
We then spend an agonizing 1/2 hour waiting for everyone to realize what every viewer who saw a preview or poster already knows - the Nimitz has gone back in time to the day before the Pearl Harbor attack. Part of the realizing is retrieving a zero pilot (Soon-tek Oh, whom you've seen guest starring in half the episodes of M*A*S*H ever made), Senator Charles Durning and his secretary/power-behind-the-thrown Katherine Ross. And, oh yeah, her dog Charlie.
Captain Kirk (gaharf gaharf), decides that paradox be damned, lets kick some Jap ass. He sends the civilians ashore, where Senator Durning manages to get everyone killed except for Farentino (the engineer/officer/pilot/historian) and Ross (the beautiful/ahead-of-her-time/political expert) who are stranded on a gorgeous expanse of uninhabited beach.
Back in the Pacific, God hears that the Nimitz is going to lay the smackdown on Yamamoto's fleet. The time storm appears again and sucks everybody back to the far-off present of 1980, before they can do anything to upset the natural order of things.
Martin Sheen and Charlie the dog disembark and are met by the Tideman's who are actually Farentino and Ross, now 40 years older and about as rich as you'd expect.
The moral of this story? In Hollywood, God will go to great lengths to reunite a dog with its owner.
Acting: surprisingly good. The actors are all talented, and better yet, they play everything straight. No sideways glances or tongues in cheek.
Effects: dated of course, but still convincing. The time storm was nicely done. Everything else wasn't really an effect - it was real planes (from an actual US aircraft carrier) along with some stock footage from Tora! Tora! Tora!
Martin Sheen is really there for our benefit. He gets to play dumb when exposed to all the little idiosyncrasies of the military (so they can be explained to us). He gets to play Devil's advocate when they decide what to do with their war machine in 1941 (so we can get a quick explanation of the Grandfather Paradox).
Which leads me to the real fun part of watching The Final Countdown: Playing what if. What if the Nimitz had gone back through time? Well let's see, you've got a ship full of high tech goodies capable of ending WW2 in short order (just nuke Tokyo and Berlin). Next, you've got the knowledge base of the Nimitz crew being thrust into 1940's America. Then there are the unexpected consequences:
It's a great little conversation starter. This time around Jason and I got into a nice debate on the limiting factors of technological advancement (Simplistically, he argued that technological advancement is limited my infrastructure, so 1980's technology would take until 1980 to develop. I argued that working examples would provide enough of a head start to take 1/3 to 1/2 the time off. Like all good debates we couldn't prove a damn thing).
We took a short break and then started our next feature, 1979's Time After Time.
It was stinky cheese. Malcolm McDowell (Playing H. G. Wells, the author and - fictitious - time machine inventor) and David Warner (Playing Jack the Ripper, who steals said time machine and goes to 1979 San Francisco) chew the scenery something awful. Mary Steenburgen (early in her career, before she learned acting) rounds out the cast.
The dialog was (especially Steenburgen's) like something out of a porn movie. Not quite "Did somebody order the twelve inch sausage", but close. Plus the character's are unbelievably stupid.
Consider the following. Jack the Ripper has stolen your time machine (which has a homing feature, so he can't keep it) and has escaped to the future). do you:
Of course, if you were really smart, you'd go back in time and stop him from stealing it in the first place - but then you don't have a movie.
Numerous problems throughout the movie would be solved if only it would occur to the characters that they have a time machine.
Despite this, the movie was quite enjoyable. Not so much for itself as for the constant heckling we subjected it to. In this it was much like the infamous Big Bugs and Transvestites party in which we watched Starship Troopers (the Big Bugs portion of the evening. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert being the transvestite portion) and anyone who wanted to complain could do so by calling pause (during which we paused the movie to allow sufficient time) and ranting.
First up, The Final Countdown. This is a basic God is screwing with you, closed-loop time travel story. Attempts to change the past are thwarted, except for those which are revealed to have always been there.
The plot: Martin Sheen is sent by his superiors at Tideman Industries to go on a trip with the USS Nimitz. While there, he manages to piss off his bunk mate James Farentino, who's a flight leader and amateur Pearl Harbor historian. Captain Kirk Douglas and XO Ron O'Neal don't much like him either.
A few hours into their cruise, the ship is chased down by a storm of a type nobody's ever seen before. It makes everybody grasp their head in a classic-trek-actor-simulating-sonic-attack sort of way and then vanishes, leaving clear skies, blue waters and confused looks.
We then spend an agonizing 1/2 hour waiting for everyone to realize what every viewer who saw a preview or poster already knows - the Nimitz has gone back in time to the day before the Pearl Harbor attack. Part of the realizing is retrieving a zero pilot (Soon-tek Oh, whom you've seen guest starring in half the episodes of M*A*S*H ever made), Senator Charles Durning and his secretary/power-behind-the-thrown Katherine Ross. And, oh yeah, her dog Charlie.
Captain Kirk (gaharf gaharf), decides that paradox be damned, lets kick some Jap ass. He sends the civilians ashore, where Senator Durning manages to get everyone killed except for Farentino (the engineer/officer/pilot/historian) and Ross (the beautiful/ahead-of-her-time/political expert) who are stranded on a gorgeous expanse of uninhabited beach.
Back in the Pacific, God hears that the Nimitz is going to lay the smackdown on Yamamoto's fleet. The time storm appears again and sucks everybody back to the far-off present of 1980, before they can do anything to upset the natural order of things.
Martin Sheen and Charlie the dog disembark and are met by the Tideman's who are actually Farentino and Ross, now 40 years older and about as rich as you'd expect.
The moral of this story? In Hollywood, God will go to great lengths to reunite a dog with its owner.
Acting: surprisingly good. The actors are all talented, and better yet, they play everything straight. No sideways glances or tongues in cheek.
Effects: dated of course, but still convincing. The time storm was nicely done. Everything else wasn't really an effect - it was real planes (from an actual US aircraft carrier) along with some stock footage from Tora! Tora! Tora!
Martin Sheen is really there for our benefit. He gets to play dumb when exposed to all the little idiosyncrasies of the military (so they can be explained to us). He gets to play Devil's advocate when they decide what to do with their war machine in 1941 (so we can get a quick explanation of the Grandfather Paradox).
Which leads me to the real fun part of watching The Final Countdown: Playing what if. What if the Nimitz had gone back through time? Well let's see, you've got a ship full of high tech goodies capable of ending WW2 in short order (just nuke Tokyo and Berlin). Next, you've got the knowledge base of the Nimitz crew being thrust into 1940's America. Then there are the unexpected consequences:
- How does the world react to a Pax Americana provided by a freak accident.
- Without the devastating events of WW2, does fascism continue to be a viable ideology into modern times.
- A big chunk of 50 million people will end up living who didn't. What are they going to do with their lives? Some will be Schweitzer's and others will be serial killers.
It's a great little conversation starter. This time around Jason and I got into a nice debate on the limiting factors of technological advancement (Simplistically, he argued that technological advancement is limited my infrastructure, so 1980's technology would take until 1980 to develop. I argued that working examples would provide enough of a head start to take 1/3 to 1/2 the time off. Like all good debates we couldn't prove a damn thing).
We took a short break and then started our next feature, 1979's Time After Time.
It was stinky cheese. Malcolm McDowell (Playing H. G. Wells, the author and - fictitious - time machine inventor) and David Warner (Playing Jack the Ripper, who steals said time machine and goes to 1979 San Francisco) chew the scenery something awful. Mary Steenburgen (early in her career, before she learned acting) rounds out the cast.
The dialog was (especially Steenburgen's) like something out of a porn movie. Not quite "Did somebody order the twelve inch sausage", but close. Plus the character's are unbelievably stupid.
Consider the following. Jack the Ripper has stolen your time machine (which has a homing feature, so he can't keep it) and has escaped to the future). do you:
- As soon as the machine returns rush around like a chicken with your head cut off, grab the cash you have on hand and no equipment and take off in hot pursuit.
- Plan, research, collect whatever you need, for as long as it takes because, hey, you have a time machine and can set it to appear in the future seconds after Jack does.
Of course, if you were really smart, you'd go back in time and stop him from stealing it in the first place - but then you don't have a movie.
Numerous problems throughout the movie would be solved if only it would occur to the characters that they have a time machine.
Despite this, the movie was quite enjoyable. Not so much for itself as for the constant heckling we subjected it to. In this it was much like the infamous Big Bugs and Transvestites party in which we watched Starship Troopers (the Big Bugs portion of the evening. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert being the transvestite portion) and anyone who wanted to complain could do so by calling pause (during which we paused the movie to allow sufficient time) and ranting.
