The film as is, has a cliche approach, and especially ending, to the question posed in the plot. It would have actually been something of a special thought experiment had the story revolved around the Nimitz actually being unleashed to it’s full potential against the Japanese fleet.
The real question of the movie to me should not have been, Is it right to change history?, but rather throw history to the wind, and let’s find out, just how much damage can a Nimitz Class Carrier (without any support ships) do to a WWII fleet? How fun would that have been to watch eh?
Instead, we get the ‘woke’ standard cliche ending, of keeping history the ‘same’, even though the movie ignores that history is already changed the moment the Nimitz interacts with the Senator and with the Jap planes. I thought it was a cowardly approach to the story honestly.
-—The film as is, has a cliche approach, and especially ending, to the question posed in the plot. It would have actually been something of a special thought experiment had the story revolved around the Nimitz actually being unleashed to it’s full potential against the Japanese fleet.——
Like with a lot of time-travel films, the plot is constructed in such a way so that the present day ends up exactly the same as it is now. It’s not as interesting as any alternatives, but you’d need a bigger budget to show the “new” reality of the present day (which you’d assume would be a lot different;how much of the film is willing to explore that?). Like many Twilight Zone episodes, the time travel experiment in this movie is set up in such a way so that its effects are temporary, or the present day reality “always” takes into account that the time travel happened but nothing major ends up different.
This particular story is difficult because if your script does want to change something, it’s changing something major that hugely effects everything that comes after. This isn’t a case of meeting your grandfather in the past and doing something that slightly changes his life, and maybe when he’s a old man he remembers you being there.
——Instead, we get the ‘woke’ standard cliche ending, of keeping history the ‘same’, even though the movie ignores that history is already changed the moment the Nimitz interacts with the Senator and with the Jap planes.——
The plot is set up in such a way that the interaction with the Senator “always” happened. I could get into a long discussion about time travel fiction and the way a lot of these things are approached. Time loops are weird, and don’t make complete narrative sense, no matter how you write them . It’s tricky.