and kick ass.

Watching GI Samurai and need to see more. Anyone have any suggestions?

The Final Countdown

^ That's the one I was about to post

For some bizarre reason when I was younger I used to get it confused with The Philadelphia Experiment.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087910/

The Final Countdown was awesome. I knew it was going to be posted because it is the only one I can think of. It's strange, really, because you would think it would be very popular genre considering it would have all the elements. Time travel, fish out of water/stranger in a strange land, action/war, etc.

One of my favorite series of books was "The Lost Battalion" about a Northern Civil War battalion that gets transported to another world set at about the medieval time period.

The Terminator

No, the question was about modern military units going back in time, not future soldiers coming back to modern times.

I thought briefly of Army of Darkness but Ash wouldn't be considered a "military unit" or even a soldier.

TIMECOP (1994) starring Jean-Claude Van Damme opens with a segment where a robber with an Uzi shows up during the Civil War to rob a gold shipment. Not quite what you're looking for, but definitely related.

Timeline had this as a plot point. The book was better, but not by much.

Yeah, I was thinking of that too but they weren't soldiers.

There are tons of science fiction novels along this line -- the subgenre even has a name, "islands in the sea of time".

Axis of Time -- a naval task force from the near-future gets sucked back to World War II. Essentially the Final Coutndown writ large.

1632 -- a coal-mining town in West Virginia is transported to Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War. There's no military unit per se, but lots of people in the town are ex-soldiers, and their hunting rifles are more advanced than anything around. So they decide to start the American Revolution a century and a half early.

Destroyermen -- A WWII destroyer gets sucked into an alternate Earth that's inhabited by two intelligent species, one descended from dinosaurs and the other lemurs. Oh, and the dinosaurs have a Japanese battleship on their side.

Sadly, none of these have been turned into movies.

I'll have to check some of those out. Have you read the Lost Regiment series? I HIGHLY recommend them (I earlier mistyped calling them the Lost Battalion)
You know what DVDTalk needs? A book forum.

What they did with The Final Countdown pretty much ruined it for all other movies, because they smartly explained by Lasky (way before BttF did) the ramifications about changing history and what would have happened had they engaged the Japanese and prevented Pearl Harbor from being bombed.

Yeah, they punked out. What they should have done is nuked Moscow and the eastern front. At that time that would have destroyed the bulk of both the communist and nazi armies.

It's been awhile but weren't one or two of them soldiers?

I second the Destroyermen series. Another fun one is Conquistador by S.M. Stirling. The military opens a portal to an alternate Earth in the 1940s. It's a great book.

There's a Twilight Zone episode, "The 7th Is Made Up Of Phantoms". Similiar to Final Countdown. Modern military tank unit ends up back in time at Little Big Horn just in time for Custer's Last Stand.

For those that liked Destroyermen and the others, you might want to check out the Axis of Time trilogy by John Birmingham.

Strange there are quite a few books on this, but few movies.

Edit...oops. I notice now it was already mentioned.

Good point.

Remember also, The Final Countdown is different from BTTF in the fact that the time rift at the end of TFC forces the Carrier to call back it's planes and forget about engaging the enemy en route to Pearl Harbor. Almost like nature is preventing a big change in history from occuring by placing that storm there.

TFC also opens with specific character(s) in the limo, one of which made sure Martin Sheen's character was on board the carrier before the jump back in time. This suggests the same "whatever happen happened" theory that Lost would eventually use. Certain characters always got stuck in the past, and the carrier was always present on that day and did not engage the Japanese fleet.

Wonderful movie btw!

Loved that episode.

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Yeah, but if they'd done that they would have returned to 1980 and mole people would have enslaved humans and the sky would rain donuts.

Not a movie, it's anime series called Zipang. It's very similar with Final Countdown, but on Japanese side. Zipang at IMDb

Sounds interesting, I'll look it up.

Another good book sort of along these lines is Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove. In it, during the US Civil War, the Confederate Army is given trainloads of AK-47s with plenty of ammunition.

As far as the original question goes, Timeline and The Final Countdown were the only two I could think of.

Two from a few years ago that come to mind...the first is a remake - again from Japan - of G.I. SAMURAI...the second is from South Korea - HEAVEN'S SOLDIERS.

The G.I. Samurai (1979) remake is called Samurai Commando Mission 1549 (2005).

You guys are forgetting one of the greatest military back in time movies ever... beside final countdown obvi


TMNT III!!!