ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

R A Abbott Whilst ironing I figured I'd turn the TV on, this film was already on. Ever witnessed a car crash or someone fall over, you know it's going to be bad but you couldn't look away? This was like that. I watched it to the bitter end, it's flawed and cheesy, poorly edited and the soundtrack trite, I rate several of the actors in it but you can only do so much so I don't lay the blame at their feet as if the script is laughable and the director tells you to stumble down that corridor uttering scripted banalities then that's what you do. The original was much better with probably a much smaller budget and FX team so watch that instead. Trust me. Still, I did get my ironing done and that's something.

haimericus Usually I watch SyFy original movies just for laughs, but this actually had some interesting plot points and decent acting in some of the major roles. The basic concept is sound: a top-secret project to create an invisibility cloak, building on the supposed 1940s Philadelphia Experiment with the destroyer USS Eldridge, actually creates a link between the two events, with increasingly catastrophic results. Instead of the star-crossed lovers of the 1980s movie, we have the 1940s Eldridge survivor (played rather well by Nicholas Lea) teaming up with his own granddaughter. Kind of sweet, and makes for an interesting scene when she meets him--she recognizes him from old family photographs, and here he is, sitting in her (his?) house. And not every time travel story has the guts to end with, "Okay, we fixed the timeline, so actually none of this ever happened and no one's the wiser."The biggest plot issue: The government baddies who keep trying to kill people who could help them solve the problem. For crying out loud, once a destroyer has landed on top of the Sears Tower, it's a little late for a cover-up. It really seemed as though the evil-government-operatives angle was more an excuse to have chase scenes and explosions than anything else. There were also some interesting plot threads that were left hanging--Who was on the telephone, warning our heroes about the baddies? What was the "Ivory Gate" thing about? If Salinger thought the whole concept was a bad idea, why did he instigate a shadow project to parallel the government's research? Maybe there was more on these originally, but it got cut from the final edit because someone thought we needed more gunfire and explosions.Not a great movie, but so much better than most of their original movies!

mikevonbach Decent remake of the 1984 film mainly just takes the basic plot and takes it into a new direction so those who loved the original movie and its love story can rest easy. In this version, a government agency is doing work on the original Philadelphia Experiment when something goes wrong and the ship Eldridge ends up floating around in time. The sole survivor (Nicholas Lea) ends up getting off the ship in 2012 and teams up with his granddaughter (Emilie Ullerup) to try and find out what's going on and how to stop it. I actually thought that the first hour of this film was better than anything in the original movie but sadly the final thirty-minutes start to go overboard but in the end we're still left with a fairly impressive movie and especially considering it aired on SyFy. What I enjoyed most about the first half is simply the confusion of the Bill Gardner character as he tries to figure out what went wrong in the 1943 experiment and how it has gotten him placed in 2012. I thought the early scenes between him and his granddaughter were quite entertaining and I thought the action scenes that followed with the two were well directed. The problem happens when the super secret government people start to show up with murder in their eyes and this is when the first loses its brain and fall off track. I'd say the superhuman powers that Gardner receives is also something that didn't work too well. I thought both Lea and Ullerup were extremely good in their roles and their performances made the film all the more enjoyable. Malcolm McDowell has a quite cameo but is a lot of fun and the original star Michael Pare is also on hand here so that should thrill fans of the 1984 film. I had just watched the original film days before this one and I said that the material was so strong that it really needed a bigger budget to fully capture everything it could. That didn't really happen with this movie as there's still something better that could come from the material but this here is still worth

thypoopie I could not connect with the characters on any level keeping them strangers throughout the whole film. As good as the performers were with their respective characters the story appeared to fall short giving them that opportunity. I failed miserably to comprehend a motivation behind many scenes that appear to depict blatant irrationality. As much as I value Michael Pare's work, I don't feel that the kind of killer he was screened to play really had a place in the film.Although the complete retelling of a story so memorable is refreshing, I think it could have been much more successful without the killing and cold-hearted villainy.