Expectations have not been high for Dean Israelite’s feature
directorial debut, Project Almanac. The Michael
Bay-produced, teen-centric, found footage time travel film, formerly titled
Welcome to Yesterday, has been pushed back and delayed multiple
times, ultimately dropped at the tail end of January, and beginning late last
week there was even rapid scramble to excise a two-second clip from the movie
and the promotional material—it featured footage of a real life plane crash,
which incensed families of the casualties. The deck is certainly stacked
against this one, but despite all of that, as well as being totally
predictable, Project Almanac is actually a decent amount of
fun.
From word one, you know precisely where this movie is going.
It doesn’t break any new ground, not even remotely, but what makes
Project Almanac endearing is the self-awareness and
earnestness of the characters. These are pop culture obsessed kids who watch
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure as a kind of time travel
research and take their cues about what is and isn’t possible from
Looper. And at a structural level, the plot actually plays
out like a simplified version of Primer.
David Raskin (Johnny Westin) is way smart. You get that from
the opening scene where he shows off a fancy pair of gloves he’s designed to
control a flying drone with exquisite precision. This is an attempt to get into
MIT, which he does, but misses out on the fellowship he needs to make this
financially possible. In a last ditch effort, he scrounges through his dead
father’s things—daddy was a scientist, an inventor of sorts—looking for
anything that will give him a leg up. When he and his sister, Chris (Virginia
Gardener), discover an old video camera, they find something shocking. In
footage of David’s seventh birthday party, the last thing their father filmed,
they see David, present day David, in the background. This leads to the
discovery that dear old dad built the components of a time machine.
Along with their equally nerdy friends, Quinn (Sam Lerner)
and Adam (Allen Evangelista), they piece together the device, test it, and
tinker around with the timeline. It’s this period, where they fidget with the
design and scrape together the parts, that the movie is both the most fun and
will test your suspension of disbelief the most. Sure, these kids are wicked
smart, but they’re also in high school, and there are a few substantial leaps
that are bound to stretch your credulity. But for the most part, the chemistry
the characters have carries you through. They’re just as psyched as you would
be to find a time machine as you would be, and their enthusiasm is infectious,
and you legitimately form a bond with them, even though this is all very trite
and silly.
Of course, they use their new toy for the impetuous trifles
of youth. They get redo on a big test in one Groundhog
Day-esque sequence, Chris gets a touch of vengeance against he mean
girl who bullies her (this is a weird, relatively unexplored aside), and of
course they win the lottery, though not as much as they intended, due to some
poor penmanship, among other funny gags. And of course there’s a hot girl,
Jessie (Sofia Black-D’Elia), who David pines after who can see the real him.
It’s goofy and you see every beat coming a mile off, but somehow it still works
well enough that you can get past the obvious flaws.
As you imagine, this honeymoon period wears off, and
Project Almanac makes a drastic tonal turn as their
dalliances in the past start to have unanticipated, catastrophic consequences
in the present. The fun-and-games portion of the program goes on for so long—too
long, it could stand to be trimmed down—that by the time things need to get
serious, the shift is so sudden that it’s jarring. This is also where the level
of fun takes a sharp nosedive. David takes it upon himself to fix everything,
and as you imagine, the situation continues to spiral out of control towards an
obvious conclusion. You would like to see the sense of danger and impending
doom built up a bit more, lurking at the periphery through the earlier stages
of the movie, but it arrives out of nowhere.
If you’re wary of the found footage conceit, Israelite and
company accept the limitations of the format and do their best to keep it from
being a distraction. They know, as well as you do, that there are going to be
scenes that no one has any business filming, and there’s a tongue-in-cheek
running joke where characters look at the camera and remark, “Really, you’re
filming this?” While that could get obnoxious, the self-awareness
keeps it light. Instead of sticking to the tropes of the genre, the film
employs things like a soundtrack, slow motion, and more traditional cinematic
techniques to keep the baser impulses at bay. And their attempts, while not
perfect, are enough to keep many of the usual problems from, well, becoming a
problem.
Project Almanac is far from perfect, and while
you never quite shake a sense of déjà vu while you watch, it’s goofy and
endearing enough to be worth your time. You’ll groan at some of the choices of
the young characters, but they groan right along with you and then move on.
There are clever moments, and heart to spare, and despite the predictable
nature, this is more than enough to add up to a decently entertaining movie.
[Grade: B-]
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