The Philadelphia Experiment (1984)

By CinemaSerf

Sadly, this has dated really quite badly but it’s still quite a decent story. With the US Navy working in the middle of WWII to find a way to make allied shipping invisible to their Nazi enemy, they think they might have found a gadget to do just that. Off goes the USS “Eldridge” but before the exercise can be completed, two of it’s crew disappear and find themselves transported forty years into the future. Meantime, “Longstreet” (Eric Christmas) - the very scientist who devised the technology in the first place, is looking to try to retrieve the men. Meantime, lost souls “David” (Michael Paré) and “Jimmy” (Bobby Di Cicco) are having a few problems of their own in 1984 as the latter man has a bit of an incident at hospital and they realise that they are going to need to contact the scientist and hope his future self, if he’s even still alive, believes their story and helps them repatriate to their own timeline. There’s some thought gone into the script and the plot here, and though I felt the acting all a bit flat, it still manages to use it’s visual effects imaginatively as it supposes just how time travel might occur and at how it might impact on two young men who had rarely ever left home. There’s a little bit of romance for “David” with the helpfully gullible “Allison” (Nancy Allen) and also just an hint of plausible science that attempts to visualise just how it all might have worked, as opposed to some “TARDIS” style arrangement where you just change the scenery. It has a made-for-television look to it, but it’s worth a watch.