Project Almanac Review: Better Than It Could Have Been

Project Almanac review: a middle-of-the-pack time-travel movie

Time-travel movies carry an automatic risk. Even the best of them have inconsistencies and paradoxes that can sink a plot if the audience stops to think. The ones that work, like Back to the Future or the Star Trek films that use the idea, pull viewers into the characters so completely that small logic problems fade. The ones that fail leave people rolling their eyes at the whole premise. This Project Almanac review puts the film somewhere in the middle, nearer the good end for its first hour and the weaker end in its last.

The film was directed by Dean Israelite in his feature debut and produced by Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Bradley Fuller through Platinum Dunes. It was shot in Atlanta, shown on the found-footage model, and sat on the shelf for a while. Paramount originally dated it for February 28, 2014, under the title Welcome to Yesterday, then moved it and gave it its current name. When it finally opened on January 30, 2015, the result was a teen sci-fi picture with a modest budget and a young, mostly unknown cast.

It opens with David, played by Jonny Weston, whose sister Chris, played by Virginia Gardner, is filming his application video for MIT. David has built an impressive flying machine, controlled by hand gestures, with the help of two friends. He gets into MIT, but the school does not offer enough scholarship money, and the news deflates him. He decides to try for one last independent scholarship and goes through his late father's files. Among them is a camcorder that recorded his seventh birthday party, and in the footage, an 18-year-old David is visible in the background.

Building the machine

That discovery sets the plot in motion. David and Chris, with friends, break into the father's basement workshop and find plans for a time machine. They build it. Along the way they pick up the film's love interest, Jessie, played by Sofia Black-D'Elia, and the five of them eventually jump back in time together.

The found-footage format is a mixed blessing. It gives the film a scrappy, homemade energy that suits a story about teenagers with a gadget, and it justifies a handheld style that keeps the camera close to the actors' faces. It also imposes rules. Every moment has to be filmed by someone, and the characters keep a camera running in situations where no sensible person would. The audience accepts this for the sake of the form, but the tension between plausibility and style never goes away, and it grows more obvious as the stakes rise.

The early uses are small and satisfying. They pass a chemistry test, they confront a bully at school, and they enjoy the freedom of a world with undo buttons. The movie understands that teenagers given a time machine would not save the world. They would fix a grade and settle a score. That honesty is the best thing in it.

Where it goes wrong

The Lollapalooza trip is the hinge. Until then, the group's rules keep the story orderly: the friends decide how to use the machine, who may go back and what they will change. The festival sequence is the movie's best bit of teenage wish fulfillment, a big night out with the girl David likes, and its failure is exactly the kind of small, personal disappointment that a teenager would be desperate to fix. That is a strong dramatic choice. The logic that follows from it is where the story loses its grip.

Things go awry when David takes the group to Lollapalooza and misses his big chance to kiss Jessie. He goes back alone, which breaks the rules the group has set for itself, and the present begins to unravel. The film's central paradox appears at this moment. It is never explained what happened to the David who was at Lollapalooza the first time, the one who failed to make his move, or how only one version of him returned. In a different kind of film, the gap might not matter. Here it lands at the most important point and takes the air out of the ending.

Project Almanac: what works and what does not

• Works: the teen voices and humor feel authentic, and the friendships, insecurities and romances are believable.
• Works: the young cast, largely unknown at the time, holds up the film. Several of them could easily appear in better pictures.
• Works: the desire to hold on to what the machine improves, and the later urgency to put things back, both feel real.
• Does not: the serious moments and exposition are written in stiff, stilted dialogue.
• Does not: the found-footage conceit forces the characters to film things sensible people would never record, from stealing hydrogen from a chemistry lab to private moments with a new girlfriend.
• Does not: the paradox at the end is left unexplained.

Verdict: wait for a rental, but give it a chance

Measured against the time-travel canon, the film lands where its premise suggests. It does not have the clockwork construction of Back to the Future, and it has none of the intricate loops that make Primer a puzzle for repeat viewers. It is closer in temperament to a teen drama that happens to have a time machine, which is a perfectly good thing to be. The title shift from Welcome to Yesterday to Project Almanac makes more sense in that light, since the new title leans toward mystery and thriller, while the finished film is more of a coming-of-age comedy.

The best parts of the film are human. The actors and the script sound like teenagers, and the humor is sharp. The group's decisions feel authentic, including the ones that make no logical sense. When David is ready to risk the world for the sake of a girlfriend, the film does not need to justify it. A teenage boy might do exactly that, and the movie knows it.

The casting deserves credit. Weston, Black-D'Elia, Gardner and their co-stars were largely unknown when the film opened, and the lack of familiar faces helps: the audience reads them as a real friend group instead of a lineup of stars. Weston gives David the right mix of ambition and self-pity, the kind of smart kid who has been told he is gifted and is now worried that gifted may not be enough. Black-D'Elia has the thankless job of playing the love interest, and she gives Jessie more spine than the script strictly requires. The humor lands across the whole group.

There are fair complaints beyond the paradox. It is hard to believe that a physics-obsessed high school student would have left his father's lab locked and unused in the basement for over a decade. Chris is described as a target of bullying at school, but the film never shows much of it, and her situation reads more as a line of dialogue than as lived experience. The three boys are science prodigies who, once an attractive girl joins them, take her advice on time travel. These details do not break the film, but they chip at its credibility, and a viewer who has watched a few time-travel stories will start to notice them early.

On balance, Project Almanac is a decent teen sci-fi picture with a real feel for its characters. If you love time-travel stories, or well-observed movies about teenagers, it is worth a look. If you do not, there is no urgency. There is also an unpleasant footnote: shortly before release, it emerged that the film included about two seconds of real plane-crash footage, and producer Michael Bay apologized and asked for it to be removed. That news had nothing to do with the plot, but it colored the release.

Fans of the genre will also notice where the film puts its energy. The central trouble comes from the group's own habit of fixing one more thing, not from an outside antagonist, and that keeps the story small and personal. It is the best argument for the film's modest ambitions. The advice from this Project Almanac review is modest. Wait for it to arrive on home video, where a rented copy removes the pressure of a ticket price, where the stakes of a theater ticket disappear and the film's strengths feel larger. Expect a film that gets the teenage part right and the time-travel part mostly right, and forgive it the ending. The film is a minor entry in a crowded genre, and a pleasant one, and that is a fair place for a first feature to land.

Sources

• Project Almanac, Wikipedia — cast, crew and release date