Reception
Although promoted as a summer blockbuster, The Final Countdown had mixed reviews from critics, but it did well with a public seeking an escapist movie. Vincent Canby from The New York Times considered it more of an interesting, behind-the-scenes tour of the Nimitz. "We see planes landing and taking off with beautiful precision and, just to let us know that things don't always run smoothly on the Nimitz, we also see one plane, which has lost its landing hook, landing safely anyway because of the ship's emergency gear." Roger Ebert classified it as a "logic doesn't matter in a "Star Wars"(-like) movie". He went on to clarify: "Unfortunately, the movie makes such a mess of it that the biggest element of interest is the aircraft carrier itself." Later reviews concentrated on the intriguing aspect of the time travel story, again stressing the military hardware was the real star. The U.S. Navy sponsored the film premiere and exploited the film as a recruiting tool to the extent that The Final Countdown poster appeared in U.S. Navy recruiting offices shortly after the film's release.
Read more about this topic: The Final Countdown (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)