Everyone's heard of a movie where improbable events take place aboard a US Navy aircraft carrier, right? It stars the Grumman F-14A Tomcat, has a romantic side-plot for the women to pay attention to, a lead who later becomes a player on an NBC television drama, and gorgeous aviation footage.
Top Gun, right? Wrong.
I'm talking, of course, about The Final Countdown, a 1980 motion picture starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, James Farentino, Katharine Ross, Charles Durning, and Ron O'Neal, with a score by John Scott.
Martin Sheen plays Warren Lasky, a civilian systems analyst. He's detailed to CVN 68 USS Nimitz while she's on deployment to the Pacific Ocean, ostensibly to conduct a study on USN procedures. In other words, a wonk before wonks existed.
Kirk Douglas plays Captain Matthew Yelland, an 'old man of the sea' who's pleasantly tolerant of this interloper. His XO, Commander Dan Thurman, is played by the late Ron O'Neal, who also made an appearance in Red Dawn as the South American---maybe Nicaraguan---officer who has a change of heart.
The last man I'll mention is Commander Richard T. Owens, commander of Carrier Air Wing EIGHT. 'CAG'---short for 'Commander, Air Group' and his shorthand reference throughout the film---is played by James Farentino, another actor who seems to have been important in 1970s cinema. Commander Owens is writing a book on naval history, and this becomes relevant to the film in due course.
While on maneuvers in the Pacific Ocean, CVN 68 USS Nimitz encounters an electromagnetic storm that hurls it backwards through time, from 06 December 1980 to 06 December 1941. That's all you need to know.
The DVD itself is released by Blue Underground, an outfit more famous for releasing movies that've been somewhat obscure, for whatever reason. Both widescreen and fullscreen versions are available, along with a two-disc limited edition widescreen set. I, of course, got the latter one, one of 100,000 being produced. William Lustig, the man in charge at Blue Underground, has stated in an interview that this is far and away BU's best seller, and well it should be.
The extras include a short interview with a fellow named Lloyd Kaufman, an associate producer for the film, and an interview with the members of Fighter Squadron EIGHTY FOUR, the now-disestablished Jolly Rogers. The latter interview is worth a fair amount of money on its own, and connects well with the film. The pilots interviewed all flew the Tomcat work done in the movie, and you get to see a little bit of the interaction between highly-trained professional aviators and highly-trained professional movie people, and also their interaction with Katharine Ross.
I've been watching this movie on TV or VHS for twenty-odd years, and I've got to say that this is a fantastic release. I found out it about it one evening and raced about trying to find the two-disc set, finally settling for an order from Borders. Such was my anxiety to acquire this film that I went back to Borders later and dropped thirty bucks without hesitation on a copy that I found nestled on a cart.
I want a medal for Conspicuous Consumption, First Class. Sooner or later, I should be up for a Hero of the War Economy medal, plus copious cleanly-scrubbed capitalist babes clustered around me for official ITAR-TASS photo shoots.
Posted by Country Pundit at April 12, 2004 12:51 AM