Too many fans seem to be blown away

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This was the first movie that I noticed Michael Pare' in. I had watched him in "The Greatest American Hero" but he was a supporting player and I think he left the series before it ended. I did not see "Eddie And The Cruisers" until later and that was Tom Berenger's movie so Mr. Pare' was a supporting actor in it too. Of course, "Eddie And The Cruisers II' was Michael Pare's movie through and through. This no disrespect to Michael Pare' but at that time, I tended to focus on the lead actors and actresses rather than the supporting actors. However, after seeing "The Philadelphia Experiment", I came away with the opinion that Michael Pare' was an actor who was going places and was I ever right. He has a very successful career and is one of the actors that I like in almost every part that he does. Nancy Allen and Bobbi DiCicco also have done well in their careers. Good job to all of you and the rest of the cast of this important movie.

a nice idea. and a reasonable use of it. the love story. and the exploration of the time travel with not bad result. a film who must be discovered in the context of its period. because, out of it, it seems be misunderstood. sure, it is far to be a masterpiece but its basic virtue is to remind a moment from WWII and to propose a story starting from it. and nothing wrong in essence. only sides of an ambiguous situations, mixing romanticism Sci. Fi. and Michael Pare with Eric Christmas. sure, the pillar remains Nancy Allen performance.but the film, as start point for a large controversy, is more than nice. and this fact, maybe, is the most important.

This hasn't gone down in the annals of sci-fi history as one of the great sci-fi stories of all time, but it's an enjoyable enough story and features pretty decent performances from the two leads, Michael Pare and Nancy Allen. It ran the risk of becoming little more than a time travel, fish out of water kind of movie but it overcame that in the end by becoming an interesting and thought-provoking story about the danger of science (or at least scientists) pushing things too far when they really aren't sure what it is they're dealing with.The movie begins in 1943, with the US Navy conducting an experiment to see if it could render the USS Eldridge invisible to enemy radar. In the movie, they not only succeeded in doing that, they accidentally put the Eldridge into some sort of space and time vortex, while two of the crew members, after leaping overboard, inexplicably found themselves in the middle of the Nevada desert in 1984. In that time, strange weather patterns are emerging, and it turns out that another similar experiment has been conducted, which somehow linked the two experiments, creating this "rip" in the time-space continuum that's now threatening to devastate the world.The premise of the movie is OK, and it's based on some urban legends of what happened when the US Navy really did experiment with trying to make naval vessels invisible to German mines using electrical fields during World War II. The actual "story" is that the Eldridge, during one such experiment, actually did disappear from the Philadelphia Harbour in 1943, appear briefly in the harbour at Norfolk, Virginia and then reappear in Philadelphia, apparently having gone backward in time a few seconds. That's legend. There's no evidence that any such thing ever happened, but it makes for a good story. The movie builds on that story, adding the story about a 1984 experiment and creating a more dramatic story of time travel as a result.Pare's character is David Herdeg, an Eldridge crew member who gets trapped in 1984, and Allen plays Allison, who meets him in 1984 and becomes his helper, companion and love interest. The romance element of the story I could have done without. The relationship built too quickly, and while Allen's performance was good, I didn't find the character of Allison to be especially believable. Pare was pretty good portraying David struggling to figure out the world of 1984. (It's a bit jarring to watch this almost 30 years after it was made, trying to imagine the technology of 1984 as mysteriously futuristic. I mean, they still used rotary telephones in this!) The movie weakened at its end. The romance, again, didn't help and it seemed a little bit rushed, although the ethical dilemma was highlighted as David finally encounters the 1984 version of the scientist who had conducted the 1943 experiment and wonders why, given how disastrous the 1943 experiment had obviously been, they would try it again.It's enjoyable enough, though. It's not a classic and I'd characterize it more as a time-waster than anything else, but it's a decent time waster. (6/10)

There are a lot of questions surrounding The Philadelphia Experiment. How is it that 1940s era sailors got 1980s haircuts before they even traveled forty years into the future? How could Manfred Mann perform "The Runner" without worrying that a version of himself from 1964 might suddenly appear and rip out his vocal cords for singing such a typically idiotic 1980s type song? Why is that time travelers always make it look so easy to find a love interest? How was it that after screwing up the Philadelphia Experiment, the military still has complete confidence in Dr. James Longstreet to allow him to pursue his misguided experiments for the next forty years? My rating: 9.7 and one half stars. The Philadelphia Experiment gets an extra half star because the time travelers see punk rockers at a diner out in the Nevada desert. Also, every car chase featured a vehicle flipping over.