Continuing my time travel theme I managed to see The Philadelphia Experiment online.
Made in 1984 fours years after The Final Countdown the Philadelphia Experiment is a much more complex multi-dimensional film.
Reversing the direction of travel The Experiment sends two US sailors from 1943 to 1984 America. The fact that they are out and about in society makes it immediately more complicated and their interactions cause confusion and alarm on both sides.
One of the sailors is utterly fascinated by a TV remote, the speed of a Porsche sports car and sexuality on TV. The other sailor is dogged by the wormhole they fell through and eventually vanishes.
The central idea of the film is the notion that simultaneous radar-invisibility experiments by the US Navy in both 1943 and 1984 unwittingly create enough linked energy to open a portal.
I find the concept of energy surges from the past emerging in the future fascinating. I suppose the cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang causing snow on our TV screens is a potent example.
If I remember my basic science then energy cannot be destroyed, only transferred. This would suggest that today's energy is the energy of the past anyway. Energy appears to be travelling with us in time but can it travel through time in either direction as the Philadelphia Experiment suggests and cause a wormhole?
As with the Final Countdown someone was left behind in the Experiment. Love keeps him in the future. More interestingly for me, two characters from the 1943 incident are shown to grow old naturally over the proceeding 40 years and know all about the wormhole when it appears in 1984, they being old men by this point. One of them is the Chief radar scientist, the cause you might say.
This device of fixing observers into time-travel stories seems important to our enjoyment and understanding of the films. We can relate to them somehow since like us watching the tale unfold on the screen they are simply bystanders burdened with the weight of their own histories.
I've stopped making sense so I'll re-enter the portal now and find a big plastic Aircraft carrier to mess with!
Have you seen the Philadelphia Experiment treaders?