The Philadelphia Experiment

Bad acting, bad writing, bad effects, bad everything. Don't waste your time. You have been warned.

I had looked forward to this and I was so disappointed. What a wonderful movie the first was ..... and now this

Acting awful despite good actors .... must be the directors fault.

There are under-laying music during the whole movie which is properly the only way they thought they could get excitement up with the viewers.

Its just awful, awful, awful.

What a shame ....... it could really have been good

Why would anybody do this and spoil the memory of an excellent movie is pitiful.

This remake of the 1980s cult movie was doomed from the start. It was made by Canadian filmmakers (strike one!) with Cinetel Films (strike two!) for the SyFy network (strike three, you're out!) Now, I will say that the screenplay does have a few good ideas here and there, though they are minor details instead of something bigger. The screenplay as a whole is a mess, however - there are a lot of things that are simply not explained or are completely missing. The movie felt like a quick first draft instead of something that had been gone over many times to patch up any shortcomings. Though had the screenplay been better, the movie would have suffered from a shabby look. The movie looks real cheap, even the scenes that don't depend on special effects or sets. The original movie wasn't anything earth-shaking, but it was a lot better in every department you can think of.

Corniest movie I've ever seen - can't believe that Malcolm Macdowall would lend his name to this tripe.

Simply unbelievable sequences where a (seemingly) 30-35 year old woman can single handedly order nuclear attacks (OK OK - so she says the President authorized it - but dear me).

Not clear why they are trying to kill the main characters chasing them all over the countryside (despite the scientific advice that says don't do it).

Also when Carl finally gets off the ship by metamorphosing through the hull (how did he do that?) - there is Molly standing at that very point to meet him

The Philadelphia Experiment (2012)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

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 viewing.