The Philadephia Experiment II is a 1993 science fiction film and the sequel to The Philadelphia Experiment.
Herdeg wakes up one morning to discover that Germany has retroactively conquered the United States, apparently having won World War II using a mysterious super-bomber. It turns out that yet another teleportation experiment resulted in the transportation of a nuclear-armed F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter to 1943, and he must return to the past to stop it from being used by the Nazis. It features none of the original cast.
The Philadephia Experiment II provides examples of:
- Alternate History: A scientific experiment sends a stealth fighter carrying nuclear bombs back in time to 1943. The Nazis capture the jet and use it to bomb Washington D.C. and win World War II.
- Artistic License – Physics:
- The actual range of an F-117 Nighthawk without in-flight refueling is approximately 1,070 miles, far less than the approximate 7,500+ miles the distance would be from France to Washington DC.
- Also, while the Germans had developed jet engine fighters near the end of WWII, that doesn't mean that they can make the right type of jet fuel that the F-117A's more modern engines run on.
- For Want Of A Nail: A rather big nail, but still.
- Giving Radio to the Romans: Albeit by accident — a stealth aircraft armed with nuclear bombs is transported back in time to Nazi Germany, where it's used to attack several cities in the eastern United States.
- Godwin's Law of Time Travel: The point of the film.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: You'd think that scientists in this world would have figured out by now not to try to teleport things or make them invisible.
- Identical Grandson: The main villain and his father are played by the same actor.
- A Little Something We Call "Rock and Roll": Rock's absence in the alternate Nazi-run America is indirectly noted. The main bad guy is introduced as he tries to decide what background music to use for a propaganda film celebrating 50 years of totalitarian rule. After listening to Mahler, Wagner, Strauss, and Handl, he decides that "highbrow Eurotrash" won't cut it. Later on, he settles on country swing, but it still doesn't sound quite right.
- No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Justified: the stealth bomber used to nuke DC came from the future, and the scientist who worked with it was so eager to use it to secure victory for his nation that he didn't study it enough to replicate the technology; he ended up disgraced because he wasn't able to create any more planes after the original was lost in the bombing run.
- Psychic Nosebleed: Herdig has one of these early in the film, implied to be a result of experiments that affect the space-time continuum wreaking havoc on his unusual physiology.
- Ret-Gone: Herdig kills the father of the father of the villain in the past, erasing the villain from existence, and in so doing also erasing the experiment that kicked off the plot in the first place.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Somehow the altered modern timeline knows about what went wrong in the unaltered one.
- David Herdig's unique physiology causes him to be unaffected by changes to the timeline. As a result, his memories are not affected when history is altered.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: A variation in that Herdeg has to fix the past to stop the future from screwing with the past.
- Stable Time Loop: Inverted; see below.
- Stupid Jetpack Hitler: Thanks to Time Travel.
- Temporal Paradox: In this case, setting right what once went wrong destabilizes the Stable Time Loop and erases the entire incident from ever having happened
