Review ‘Project Almanac’ From The Editor

What would it take for you to go back in time? Most temporal rebels have one heck of a motivating force: the death of a loved one, in the case of the H.G. Wells novel that started it all, or the dire need to ace a history project, in the case of Bill & Ted. Maybe, like Marty McFly, they just get flung back there, and have to set everything right for the present again. In director Dean Israelite’s debut feature Project Almanac, our teenage time-hoppers go back in time, well, kind of just because they can.

Project Almanac is the story of five kids and the most durable camcorder in the universe. It borrows the found footage conceit from horror romps like Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, and The Blair Witch Project, even though it’s a sci-fi teen romance, not a horror film. The characters aren’t filming everything in the hopes they’ll catch a ghost on tape; they’re documenting their progress in an unlikely series of experiments vaulting between timelines.

The movie’s hero is David Raskin (Jonny Weston), a likable high school inventor/bookworm whose delight over an MIT acceptance is dashed by the knowledge that his single mom can’t afford the tuition. While digging through his deceased dad’s unfinished research in hopes of earning a new scholarship, David unearths an old video camera that has tape from his seventh birthday party. The nostalgia of the milestone moment is drained, however, once David spies his current form walking through the background of the 10-year-old footage.

How is that possible? David and his tech-savvy teen cohorts start digging through the dead dad’s basement laboratory – which, I suppose, hasn’t been touched in the decade since dad’s death, but stop asking questions and just go with it, OK? They coincidentally discover that David’s father was dangerously close to completing work on a temporal relocation device. That means time travel. Since they have the blueprints in their hands, David and his crew begin to experiment, and before you can say flux capacitor, they’re successfully traveling back in time (with increasingly disastrous results).

It takes them a long time to get there, though, and most of the film focuses on all of the fun they’re able to have as tempo-nauts. They don’t have much reason to visit the past, other than winning the lottery and going to last summer’s Lollapalooza to hang with Imagine Dragons and Atlas Genius (seriously).

David doesn’t even seem that interested in saving his dad from the car crash that claimed his life. He’s worked fervently on a seemingly impossible science project, but why? Even that scholarship is quickly forgotten.

Of the five actors in the main cast, only Black-D’Elia is given much to work with. Jessie has a studied cool and a natural sarcasm, and her fondness for David and the gang evolves naturally. Adam and Quinn are textbook dorks leering at the hot girls, Christina plays the negging sister who records everything, and David’s two character traits are “smart” (he wears glasses) and “awkward” (sometimes he says the wrong thing). It’s an ensemble film that doesn’t give its ensemble much to do beyond the perpetual pursuit of “awesome.”

In its closing moments, Project Almanac tries to generate tension by butterfly-effecting the audience into submission, but the consequences of David’s action raise more questions than the movie’s able to answer. Still, there’s hope for the future of the teens who are sure to be in the theaters watching this film. If we’re lucky, a butterfly effect of Almanac will be curious audience members renting those great films, to see how time travel should be handled on screen.