The Final Countdown

While trying to figure out what to watch during our Sunday evening snuggling on the couch, I had an overwhelming burst of nostalgia...Netflix recently added the movie The Final Countdown!  For those of you who didn't have HBO back in the early-to-mid 1980's, you might not have seen The Final Countdown...set in Modern Times(which for this movie is 1980), The Final Countdown stars Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, and The Guy that plays the head Cuban in Red Dawn and involves the USS Nimitz getting sucked back through a 'time portal' to December 6th, 1941. 

That's right...F-14's vs. Mitsubishi Zero's...who can resist that?  I couldn't when I was 12(I must have watched that movie 35-40 times on HBO) and I found I couldn't resist it now.  It didn't take much convincing for my wife to be willing to give it a try(have I mentioned how amazing she is?).

Sometimes, when you haven't seen a movie in a long, long time, it doesn't quiet measure up to the movie that is in your mind.  The Final Countdown does a pretty good job of living up to the what was in my memory...slightly less action-packed that I remember..there is only 1 real scene where you get to see just how awesome it would be to have a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier on your side at the beginning of WWII(and they never even mention that as a strategic asset, Nimitz would have had nukes on board).  The other thing that caused a mental flinch out of me was the dungarees the guys were wearing, and THEIR BEARDS.  Talk about a flashback...

SWMBO thought the movie was okay, but that it could have used a bunch more stuff blowing up, as in the whole Japanese fleet.  She was much more impressed with how young Martin Sheen looked, and how much he sounded like Charlie.  She kept waiting for him to talk about 'winning', and offering to use 'tiger blood' to fight the Japanese. 

If somehow you have never previously seen this movie, and you have Netflix, it's worth and hour and a half of your time...