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The teens in Project Almanac wish they had this nifty time machine.
DThe teenage protagonists of Project Almanac build a time machine and use it to change the past and improve their lives. The movie’s audience would have been better served if someone had actually used a time machine to prevent screenwriters from ever using the “found footage” plot device again. Even without that pointless gimmick, Almanac‘s writers would still have needed a few more trips to the past to come up with a decent script.
David Raskin (Jonny Weston) and his buddies don’t invent the time machine; they build it from plans developed by his scientist father. Once they build their machine from spare parts in David’s basement, he and his friends use it rather predictably for teenage bucket list items like acing a chemistry exam, winning the lottery, and attending a recent rock concert. However, when David decides to use the machine to correct his missteps in trying to romance fellow time traveler Jessie Pierce (Sofia Black-d’Elia), he learns a basic axiom of time travel: changing the past can have unforeseen—and unfortunate—consequences. And the more he tries to correct his mistakes, the worse things get.
Project Almanac more closely resembles a collection of YouTube videos of a group of geeks and nerds building a science fair project and attending a rock concert than an actual theatrical motion picture. Its time travel rules seem cobbled together at random from other films like Looper and Time Cop, both referenced in the often laughable script, or The Butterfly Effect. The found footage gimmick doesn’t disguise the cheapness of the special effects or the gaping plot holes, but it does distance viewers from any potential emotional involvement in the storyline. Anyone who might actually enjoy this mess will probably be more easily, and cheaply, amused by spending two hours playing random amateur YouTube videos.
Continue reading on Project Almanac: Mini-Review
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