Favorite Movie: Forever Young

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As I was answering some threads in TalkPh, I was asked what is my favorite movie… I have so many but this one always pops first on my mind.

Being a hopeless romantic, I believe that true love can conquer anything, just like what happened in the movie.

Forever Young

Set in the year 1939, Captain Daniel McCormick (Mel Gibson) is a reckless test pilot. After a successful run in a prototype B-25 Mitchell, McCormick is greeted by his longtime friend, Harry Finley (George Wendt), who confides that his latest experiment, “Project B”, has succeeded in doing the impossible. The machine, built by Finley and his team of scientists, is a prototype chamber for cryonic freezing. When McCormick’s girlfriend Helen (Isabel Glasser) winds up in a coma from an accident, and the doctors doubt she’ll ever wake up, McCormick insists to be put in suspended animation for a year, so he doesn’t have to watch her die.

Fifty-three years later, two boys playing around on the inside of a military storage warehouse stumble onto the chamber. Twisting the dials, they accidentally activate the reversal process. During the confusion, McCormick’s sleeping form reflexively grabs one of their coats. They flee in terror, and a short while later, McCormick wakes up in 1992. After appropriating some shorts and a shirt from a clothesline, he first approaches the military about his experiences. When they dismiss him as crazed, McCormick becomes all the more determined to find out what happened to Fubley, Helen, and the world that has seemingly evolved overnight around him.

His search leads him to the home of Nat Cooper (Elijah Wood), one of the two boys who opened the chamber. Though the boys are initially scared, McCormick is able to calm Cooper and his friend with the truth of his story. This bond is made stranger yet when Nat’s mother Claire (Jamie Lee Curtis) offers McCormick a place to stay, until he can find out what to do with his search. Nonetheless, McCormick’s time is running out, as his body starts to age rapidly, due to the years he spent in stasis.

When another “aging attack” practically cripples McCormick, Claire is told the amazing truth. Susan, Finley’s daughter, informs him that her father died many years earlier (the government later specifies it was a warehouse fire in the early ’40s, trying to save the frozen McCormick from the chaos). Susan also gives McCormick her father’s journals, hoping he can use them to reverse his own condition. Before leaving, Susan gives McCormick one further revelation: Helen is alive.

The final part of McCormick’s journey is to find Helen in the present day. Nat stows away on board a B-25 Mitchell, taken from an airshow, where he helps McCormick land when another attack nearly kills him. His true age now finally having caught up with him, the now-elderly McCormick asks Helen to marry him.

Plot and Picture from Wikipedia