Project Almanac Movie Review

Project Almanac (2015)

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Written by: Jason Pagan, Andrew Deutschman
Directed by: Dean Israelite
Starring: Jonny Weston, Sofia Black-D'Elia, Sam Lerner, Virginia Gardner, Allen Evangelista
Rated: PG-13
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Plot
A group of teen discover plans for and build a time machine. Of course the power to change the world spirals out of control.

Verdict
It you can abandon logic and realism, it's a fun movie with adequate special effects. You can see where it's going from a mile away, but that's the typical pitfall of a wish fulfillment movie. Their escapades escalate from going back to ace a test, attend the awesome party, and then to win the lottery. Granted, I have a propensity for time travel movies, but the science is fast and loose and the ending is too cliche. I was hoping they were building to something bigger, but they weren't. It's a fun ride that goes nowhere.
It depends.

Review
If it's a time travel movie, I'm going to watch it. The time travel logic is all over the place for the sake of making the story more entertaining, but the end is painfully cliche and typical.

Look at the time travel movie, Primer (2004). It's a bit slow and incredibly confusing, but the science is solid and that's what made it a cult classic. Primer is the hard science time travel story, Project Almanac is the made for teens fantasy. This movie could have been much better.

I don't understand why movies go for the found footage style cinematography at the detriment to the story. That style will never be as revolutionary as it initially was in The Blair Witch Project (1999). It's been done, don't imitate it.
The style doesn't put me in the middle of the action, it just annoys me. Chronicle (2012) handled this better, deftly shifting from jerky to smooth movement with one of the characters levitating the camera via telepathy through most of the movie. Similar to Chronicle, this movie has a group of teenagers discovering a great power, with the result being chaos. I'd recommend Chronicle over this.

Project Almanac - Teenage wish fulfillment that sends the world into chaos.

David's dad was a mad scientist with a caged lab in the basement. Despite his dad dying ten years ago, the kids have never once ventured into the lab... until now.

David is a typical science nerd that's applying to MIT. He has two science sidekicks, and his sister who wants to film everything. His hot girl crush gets roped into the adventure too.

It seemed like the movie might propose that time is a closed loop, but they don't maintain that for very long. To digress, time is a closed loop. Potentially, if you could go into the past and change the future, that would create an alternate timeline and a parallel world, but ultimately you can't change your future. If you change the past, you can only fulfill the future. If you are poor and go into the past to make yourself rich, you only fulfill the fact you're poor. I could get into Novikov's principle, but take my word for it that I've read a lot about time travel on wikipedia. All of time already exists. It's like a video cassette, you can't change the future of the tape because the film has already been developed.

Meeting your past self in this world is bad. We don't know why, but the reason presumably is that the plot needs more danger and intrigue. I groaned as it became obvious this move adheres to the idea that time is not a closed loop. David gets greedy, breaking the groups' cardinal rule of never going back alone. He tweaks a Lollapalooza encounter with the hot girl so that instead of accidentally dismissing her advances, they start going out. This kicks off a chain reaction of chaos and destruction. He travels alone again and again to try to fix the loop. He got the girl, but ruined the world. His Lollapalooza jump created a ripple. He doesn't want to undo that because it undoes having a girlfriend. Love is as good of a reason as any to not want to fix the timeline, but the story unravels, lacking a clear direction. The ending is uninspiring and bland. I'm sure you can guess how it ends if you've ever seen a time travel movie. It's a Pandora's box type ending.

There are numerous errors, like a starter relay causing a running car to stall out, and Quinn's phone displaying information three months ahead of their current time position. For a science movie, these errors become more noticeable.