How the USS Nimitz Became a Movie Star

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The US Navy cooperated extensively with Hollywood filmmakers for the 1980 film The Final Countdown—to the extent that nearly the entire movie was made aboard the supercarrier.

Just about everyone knows of Top Gun. The 1986 film, starring Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, was a pop culture phenomenon, the highest grossing film of its release year. For those who loved the film, the sun-soaked USS Enterprise, the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier from which Maverick and “Iceman” (Val Kilmer) launch their F-14 Tomcats, is iconic. But for more intensive film buffs and aviation nerds, there is another movie—lesser known but offering even better access to naval carrier operations than even Top Gun.

That film is The Final Countdown, released in 1980, and starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, and above all, the USS Nimitz.

When the Nimitz Got Its Close-Up

The Final Countdown is a science-fiction film in which the USS Nimitz—then the largest and most sophisticated aircraft carrier in the US Navy fleet—is inexplicably sucked through a time vortex roughly 40 years into the past,........

© The National Interest