Let's start out by saying that I *do* recommend this movie as being worth watching on its own and definitely the best of the non-trilogy consisting of the original "The Philadelphia Experiment" (1984), this 1993 film, and the 2012 remake of the first film, also named "The Philadelphia Experiment."
There are some fine ideas in the story, and its portrayal of a terrible alternate America fifty years after its conquest by Germany is feels fully credible, right down to the updated Nazi swastika, altered to be less harsh and more palatable to an American populace so huge that even after the surrender following the nuclear destruction of Washington, D.C., it would still have to be successfully subdued psychologically in order to complete the Nazi victory.
But oh, it's painful how much *better* it could have been with a less wooden leading actor and fewer bad filmmaking decisions. Brad Johnson, replacing Michael Pare as David Herdig, the man who was propelled from 1943 to 1984 in the original movie and now, nine years later, is a father and widower, just isn't very good here, and with one exception -- a fast and very well-executed sudden eruption of gunfire when Herdig's fake ID tattoo fails to satisfy a security scan -- the action sequences are simply painful to watch. Add problems like an incredibly corny and ill-advised audio montage of lines from earlier in the movie during a pointlessly extended time-travel sequence and it feels like the movie was made by two different people whose visions for it were at war with each other, only one of whom knew how to make good movies.
(As an aside: some people have complained that an important piece of the plot, a brief exchange between two German characters in 1943, was presented entirely *in* German with no English subtitles. I personally was okay with this, but I was watching the film with the closed-captioning on so I got to *see* the German words, and with that it wasn't that hard for me to figure out the gist what was being said. Without the CC though, I have to admit that I probably would have missed the important bit of information conveyed there.)
There are some fine ideas in the story, and its portrayal of a terrible alternate America fifty years after its conquest by Germany is feels fully credible, right down to the updated Nazi swastika, altered to be less harsh and more palatable to an American populace so huge that even after the surrender following the nuclear destruction of Washington, D.C., it would still have to be successfully subdued psychologically in order to complete the Nazi victory.
But oh, it's painful how much *better* it could have been with a less wooden leading actor and fewer bad filmmaking decisions. Brad Johnson, replacing Michael Pare as David Herdig, the man who was propelled from 1943 to 1984 in the original movie and now, nine years later, is a father and widower, just isn't very good here, and with one exception -- a fast and very well-executed sudden eruption of gunfire when Herdig's fake ID tattoo fails to satisfy a security scan -- the action sequences are simply painful to watch. Add problems like an incredibly corny and ill-advised audio montage of lines from earlier in the movie during a pointlessly extended time-travel sequence and it feels like the movie was made by two different people whose visions for it were at war with each other, only one of whom knew how to make good movies.
(As an aside: some people have complained that an important piece of the plot, a brief exchange between two German characters in 1943, was presented entirely *in* German with no English subtitles. I personally was okay with this, but I was watching the film with the closed-captioning on so I got to *see* the German words, and with that it wasn't that hard for me to figure out the gist what was being said. Without the CC though, I have to admit that I probably would have missed the important bit of information conveyed there.)