Rush Tarquin
Gone Fishin'
Has anyone seen Philadelphia Experiment II? It's almost painful how much of a missed opportunity that film is. It predates the Fatherland TV film by a year and is really the first depiction of an Axis victory TL in American television or film. Unfortunately, it's just so bad. Spoilers below, I guess.
It just feels like 1984-lite. If the bad guys are Nazis, why don't they look like it? The swastika has been rotated, warped beyong recognition, and combined with an eagle in every instance for some reason. It is also just generally barely present, a strange inversion of the usual Hollywood tendency to just slap swastikas on everything. (At first, I thought this was a deliberate inversion, or maybe something done under legal's advice, but then we see the swastika fetish return in full force when the protagonist travels back to the German airbase during WWII.) The security advisor looks like he's wearing some variation of an SS officer's uniform, but its devoid of any real identifying marks. In keeping with the 1984 feel, everything seems to be numbered and made to fit into grids, rather than exhibiting the Nazis usual flare for the dramatic and highfalutin. The propaganda is less Riefenstahl and more that 1984 Apple ad. How is the sound of children chanting words that end in '-ate' effective propaganda? Plus they misspell 'supplicate'.
The movie looks like it was all filmed at a gas refinery, which might be fitting since LA (sorry, 'Freedom City'
) has been turned into a giant concentration camp, but it's also rather convenient for a shoe string budget, no? If it is one big concentration camp, why do the bad guys tolerate the existence of an underground armed resistance among the prisoners. I mean, how did the Warsaw Uprising end? The love interest is a black prisoner/resistance member. But oddly, race is not addressed at all. The prisoners seem to be wearing symbols on their sleeves which categorise them, but this is also never addressed. Everyone has barcode tattoos on their arms rather than numbers, which I guess is a logical modernisation. What isn't logical is the way all the prisoners each have their own apartment, dilapidated as they are, and have no one really watching them outside of work hours and are left to roam in the residential area of the city as they please. Even the protagonist concludes from observing this that the bad guys have pretty much created their own problem, but it's not addressed how they could be so stupid.
And this is all without getting into the problems with the initial POD, of which there are many. Stealth bombers didn't have that range. They got a magic plane from the future and they instantly learned how to pilot it and the only error they made was having the plane destroyed in the blast radius of its own nuke. Really? How did one scientist manage to maintain the hoax that he had invented the plane when an entire air base had witnessed it landing out of nowhere, etc, etc. Then we get into the really silly stuff. Like a time paradox physically manifesting itself as some kind of energy lifeform, leaping from a time travel portal, and painfully dematerialising the villain who had just ceased to have ever been born. I could complain about the 90s action movie cardboard cut-out characterisation, bored acting, and equally bored directing, but they are somehow the least of this movie's problems (and kinda to be expected from a straight-to-video film of this apparently intentionally low calibre). This movie could've actually been some good old-fashioned 90s high-concept fun, and so I think the premise could've actually been promising. But with the complete lack of a budget, any attempt at world-building, or anyone really giving a shit, I really have to wonder what was the point?
It just feels like 1984-lite. If the bad guys are Nazis, why don't they look like it? The swastika has been rotated, warped beyong recognition, and combined with an eagle in every instance for some reason. It is also just generally barely present, a strange inversion of the usual Hollywood tendency to just slap swastikas on everything. (At first, I thought this was a deliberate inversion, or maybe something done under legal's advice, but then we see the swastika fetish return in full force when the protagonist travels back to the German airbase during WWII.) The security advisor looks like he's wearing some variation of an SS officer's uniform, but its devoid of any real identifying marks. In keeping with the 1984 feel, everything seems to be numbered and made to fit into grids, rather than exhibiting the Nazis usual flare for the dramatic and highfalutin. The propaganda is less Riefenstahl and more that 1984 Apple ad. How is the sound of children chanting words that end in '-ate' effective propaganda? Plus they misspell 'supplicate'.
The movie looks like it was all filmed at a gas refinery, which might be fitting since LA (sorry, 'Freedom City'
) has been turned into a giant concentration camp, but it's also rather convenient for a shoe string budget, no? If it is one big concentration camp, why do the bad guys tolerate the existence of an underground armed resistance among the prisoners. I mean, how did the Warsaw Uprising end? The love interest is a black prisoner/resistance member. But oddly, race is not addressed at all. The prisoners seem to be wearing symbols on their sleeves which categorise them, but this is also never addressed. Everyone has barcode tattoos on their arms rather than numbers, which I guess is a logical modernisation. What isn't logical is the way all the prisoners each have their own apartment, dilapidated as they are, and have no one really watching them outside of work hours and are left to roam in the residential area of the city as they please. Even the protagonist concludes from observing this that the bad guys have pretty much created their own problem, but it's not addressed how they could be so stupid.And this is all without getting into the problems with the initial POD, of which there are many. Stealth bombers didn't have that range. They got a magic plane from the future and they instantly learned how to pilot it and the only error they made was having the plane destroyed in the blast radius of its own nuke. Really? How did one scientist manage to maintain the hoax that he had invented the plane when an entire air base had witnessed it landing out of nowhere, etc, etc. Then we get into the really silly stuff. Like a time paradox physically manifesting itself as some kind of energy lifeform, leaping from a time travel portal, and painfully dematerialising the villain who had just ceased to have ever been born. I could complain about the 90s action movie cardboard cut-out characterisation, bored acting, and equally bored directing, but they are somehow the least of this movie's problems (and kinda to be expected from a straight-to-video film of this apparently intentionally low calibre). This movie could've actually been some good old-fashioned 90s high-concept fun, and so I think the premise could've actually been promising. But with the complete lack of a budget, any attempt at world-building, or anyone really giving a shit, I really have to wonder what was the point?