The Philadelphia Experiment

Probably best not to sign up when the army asks if you'd like to take part in a secret experiment, where they mention there may be potential side effects, and they aren't even offering that great a sum.

Jacob's Ladder and The X-Files make compelling cases for avoiding such initiatives anyways, the enthusiastic recruits permanently damaged after their courageous embrace of enigmatic science was forgotten.

The Philadelphia Experiment doesn't examine trial and error as it relates to medical research however, it's initially concerned with cloaking ships so the Axis can't detect them during World War II.

It's quite an elaborate set up the production impressive from a laboratory standpoint, so many lightbulbs and wires and connections that it seemed like a bona fide realistic test tube.

The special effects are classic '80s too indubitably impressive if you like that kind of thing, the transitionary phase from pioneering early sci-fi to the technological wonders we have today.

The experiment goes awry or the cloaking works too well you might say, the ship itself lost in temporal recesses two confused servicepersons transported to the '80s.

It's cool to imagine the electronic innovations of the early '80s as the height of technoendeavour, or to have been part of the audience intuitively revelling in the bewildered shock of the time displacement.

We still use one of the microwaves we bought at that time it's still in working order, although it takes awhile, knock on wood, hopefully it isn't slowly radioactively poisoning us as time goes by even if we rarely use it.

I don't know if I'm as blown away by time travel films that take place in the present, even if it happens to be around 40 years later, isn't the point to contemporize historical difference?

The Experiment still contains the classic startling moments when the different characters come to terms with their ahistorical authenticity, through the eyes of the time travellers and those they encounter alike, I'm a huge sucker for this kind of storyline.

Perhaps those old school computer graphics look as antiquated to today's youth as the monsters of '50s and '60s sci-fi did to me when I was younger, although some of those yesteryear vampire and Frankenstein films still seriously impress in this cynical day and age (horror not sci-fi I suppose).

Things are so tense politically at the moment, is it far too risky to make films where people travel to the future?

Will it seem like the ancient past?

AI ironically introducing the solution environmentalists seek.