The Final Countdown

The Final Countdown is an exciting but somewhat muddled affair, as science fiction films about time travel can be owing to their lack of logic.

Warren Lasky boards the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in his capacity as an efficiency and optimisation expert, but he soon has other things to think about when the ship is caught in a huge storm and is mysteriously swept into another time zone. It takes a while before the captain and crew fully grasp that they are in the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. What could a modern warship with state-of-the-art fighter planes not achieve against the Japanese air force of the time? The USS Nimitz never gets to change the course of events, however, before a supernatural storm once again sweeps them back to the present. Two people, though, have accidentally been left behind in the past. And so the time paradox arises!

The film may not have the world's most brilliant and innovative plot, but it manages to sustain the atmosphere all the way through.