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Articles Channel Archives   The Final Countdown   Logic is a
dangerous thing to apply to science fiction. I tried applying a
little logic to "The Empire Strikes Back" (why could they always
breathe the air everywhere they landed?), and got about 50
letters, fairly evenly divided between people logically
explaining the movie to me, and people arguing that logic
doesn't matter in a "Star Wars" movie.  It matters even less,
I'd say, in "The Final Countdown," in which the aircraft carrier
Nimitz sails through a whirlpool in time and is thrown back 40
years to the day before Pearl Harbor. It's an appealing idea: A
nuclear-powered carrier with a full complement of jet warplanes,
right off Pearl and knowing the Japanese attack plans.
Unfortunately, the movie makes such a mess of it that the
biggest element of interest is the aircraft c