FANTASIA OBSCURA: And Now the Finale!
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, when time plays tricks with you that you never expected, you can look back and see where the history was really made…
The Final Countdown (1980)
Distributed by: United Artists
Directed by: Don Taylor
“You still think it’s a dream?”
“No, it’s a nightmare.”
-dialog from the film
In many ways, that’s a good description not only of what happens in the movie itself, but what the film became afterwards…
Our films opens around the present day for the film (1980 or so) with the USS Nimitz about to take on Warren Lasky (Martin Sheen), an efficiency expert sent by his boss to be aboard her to see how she handles her tasks under operational conditions. We hear that Lasky’s boss is a bigwig with DoD and responsible for much of the Nimitz’s design, but we never see this person, whose car rolls up to make sure Lasky’s on board the carrier.
Lasky gets aboard just as her skipper, Captain Matthew Yelland (Kirk Douglas), is about to take the task force on patrol. Before getting too far out at sea in the Pacific, however, a strange weather phenomenon overtakes the ship, which has an adverse effect on the vessel:
The Nimitz finds herself out of communication with the rest of the world, until they start turning down the band onto the lower end of the AM dial, where they run across… old radio shows from the early 1940s. In fact, they end up picking up radio programs being sent out on December 6, 1941, the day before the date that would live in infamy…
This poses a series of challenges to the Nimitz and her compliment, which includes Commander Owens (James Farentino), who is an expert on the period and an invaluable insta-fact source when history shows up. Said history includes running across Senator Sam Chapman (Charles Durning) and his aide Laurel (Katherine Ross), two people that the nuclear-driven carrier rescue from a Japanese picket patrol at sea, who according to history were supposed to have disappeared just before the attack. Having them alive and in a position to change history is certainly a challenge, almost as great a one as the captured Zero pilot the Nimitz rescued who tried to kill the Senator (Soon-Tek Oh), who makes an effort to escape and is willing to take a few enemy combatants down with him…
The biggest quandary, of course, is whether to use the best the US Navy has as of 1980 to change the outcome of a naval action in 1941, if not beyond. During one scene, we see two Zeroes go up against two F-14s, and watching the action between the two craft from two eras being very much in the Americans’ favor, it’s hard to imagine the Nimitz having that much trouble taking on Admiral Yamamoto’s task force without a serious rewrite of this history books.
It’s a question that the Nimitz’s compliment has to wrestle with right up to the final moment, and a question that hangs over the film even after the die is cast, whether you believe in their choice and how it plays out in the film…
In terms of how the film itself plays out, there is not much of note from the script or the cast. The actors take their marks on the set, do the best they can with their lines, and hope for the best. It’s not like these folks are amateurs, though, with many of them with long established careers; under normal circumstances, they might have done a lot better with what they had to memorize.
The operative word here is “normal.” There’s one major prima donna in the film, and she insists that everything be her way, making the cast and crew favor her best shots and conditions not only on the set, but as the set…
The script for the film was felt to have been too expensive to produce, until producer Peter Douglas (Kirk’s son) came up with the idea to partner with the Navy to shoot aboard the Nimitz herself. The film crew embedded with the carrier in late 1979 to early 1980 for about 10 weeks in total, depending on the ship’s availability. (During some of that time, the vessel was on active duty to provide air support during Operation Eagle Claw, which were times the film crew had to wait until the Nimitz was off station.) At one point during shooting, one of the Nimitz’s fighters needed to make an emergency landing on deck; this successful effort at bringing the craft down safely made it into the film as a piece of improv on set.
The fact that the Nimitz, which was supposed to be in the Pacific, was on active station with the Atlantic fleet, was conveniently ignored by the producers. Filming most of the land scenes at Norfolk and Key West NAS, with a few pick-ups in Hawaii for fill ins, and the crew for the film did what they could with the Navy’s strictures placed on them.
(One of the associate producers, Lloyd Kaufman, could not handle working with DoD’s restrictions and was cycled off the film. He was so unhappy with the situation that he vowed never to get into such a mess again, and decided to only work from then on on films from the production company he’d formed a few years before, Troma, a source of many genre films that come after the period Fantasia Obscura covered.)
Like any diva, the Nimitz also had her hanger-ons that she insisted get some exposure as well: The F-14 Tomcat fighters that were compliment aboard her. Many of the plot elements involving fighters used the F-14, enough so that her manufacturer, Grumman Aerospace, gets a special credit on the film, in all likelihood for helping to set up cameras on the aircraft to get the POV of the pilot shots from the planes. As a result, we get to watch Navy fliers practicing their combat moves, making up most of the film. Indeed, some of the flyers we watch would go on a year later to shoot down Libyan jets in action in the Gulf of Sidra.
Also getting exposure were crew from the Nimitz during the time of filming. Forty-eight members of her crew, one of whom became a real admiral later in his career, got credits at the end of the film; a good portion of the rest of her 6,000 man compliment served as extras throughout the film.
It’s the fact that the Nimitz leaves a far bigger impression on the viewer than the film she’s in that gives the movie it’s importance as a “missing link” between genre films from the 50s through 70s, where the military is mostly a background presence, to later films from the 80s onward where the military is an active participant. What made DoD say yes to making this film aboard the Nimitz was its potential usefulness as an image builder; the Navy actually used screenings of The Final Countdown as a recruiting tool in the next decade.
It worked so well, in fact, coming out at a time when the incoming Reagan Administration was encouraging more people to join the military, that the film serves as a model for future cooperation with film makers. Many of the films from that decade with a strong military presence where the troops are shown in a positive light, even such non-genre works as Top Gun, owe their existence to the model provided by this film.
It’s also out of this movie that we see the first signs in film of the “techno-thriller” genre, the kind of stories where the characters get at best as much care as the hardware they’re going to war with. Had there not been The Final Countdown, the ground might not have been plowed enough to allow a Tom Clancy or a Larry Bond to find an audience and help move the discussion the directions they went for year afterwards.
The great irony is, that a film about time travel sets itself up as a gatekeeper between eras. It serves to be one of the last of the 1970s smaller genre films, and produced a battle plan as the harbinger of what entertainment in the 1980s would offer…
And with that, we see “The End” flash on the screen. (Maybe it says “The End…?” or if we’re lucky “Fin”.) Either the curtain comes down as the lights go up, or the TV throws to the local news, sometimes with a question that may be scarier than the film you just watched:
Either way, it’s time to get up and move on.
As it is for me.
I owe a lot of thanks to my editors and colleagues at REBEAT. My thanks to Allison Boron, who over four years ago was willing to entertain my pitch for a regular look at genre films that came out during the time REBEAT covered, and somehow didn’t get sick of it as we went through 188 columns. I owe a lot to Sharon Lacey, who was there as we chugged along and even suggested a few films that made the grade as subjects of pieces.
(Not all of them did, but if I went into all the films I wish I’d had a chance to say something about, we’d be here way too long; short and sweet, that’s the better option here…)
I especially have to thank the Shortens, Steve for sharing his memories about Son of Dracula and Beth for her suggesting Ladybug Ladybug as a feature. And for Greg Cox for calling us out that time and helping us find our way, keeping us in pursuit of the truth at a time when so many-
No, must. Resist, Obvious. Comment, even now…
And I have to thank you, the reader, for sticking with this. Having a chance to bring up what films made up the body of genre works that were alongside Forbidden Planet, Rosemary’s Baby, 2001, Planet of the Apes, The Shining, and Star Wars, my hope is that there was some broadening of understanding of the field, from the tastes of the audiences to how the film makers plied their trade to entertain them.
But, once upon a time, films were shown through projectors that needed bulbs that burned brightly, so hot they threatened to set the projectionist on fire. And right now, I’m about to go up like Johnny Storm. I have some things that need my attention away from older genre films, such as devoting more time to my wife Susan, as well as a few writing projects I’m working on.
I’m not sure what’s going to be in the sequel, if there is one, but if there’s one thing a lot of genre films from the time gave us, it’s the guarantee that nothing is ever really final, as Dr. Manhattan noted on his way out the door.
So, for now, it’s… “The End…?”
