Movie Review: 'Project Almanac'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Ahh, teens with a time machine. Think of the possibilities!
The makers of Project Almanac have done just that and come up with a nifty little thriller.
Originally titled "Almanac," then "Welcome to Yesterday," Project Almanac is a found-footage time-travel drama that recalls 2012's Chronicle, in which a group of teenagers find themselves in possession of extraordinary powers.
In Project Almanac, certainly Chronicle's worthwhile companion piece, high school senior David Raskin (played by Johnny Weston) is a brilliant science geek who, when the film opens, is putting his application video together to submit to MIT.
He does get accepted, but does not receive the scholarship that he and his single mom (Amy Landecker) were hoping for.
Desperately needing the money, he explores the possibility of following through on an experiment his late father began years ago. In the attic, he finds in his dad's workshop a camcorder, allowing him to screen footage from his seventh birthday party, the last time he saw his father alive.
But to his jaw-dropping astonishment, he spots himself –- at his current age –- walking around at his younger self's party.
Whoa.
That means that his father had apparently constructed and activated a time machine -– a so-called "temporal relocation prototype." It's an incredible discovery that David immediately shares with his two best buddies (played by Sam Lerner and Allen Evangelista) and his little sister (Virginia Gardner), who is documenting the experience by shooting most of the video we're watching.
Maybe now he can even work up the nerve to approach Jessie, the girl in school (Sofia Black-D'Elia) who occupies his thoughts when he's not focused on the new project.
Which he is. And, in possession of the blueprints and accompanied by his two friends, he gets to work decoding the mysteries of the device, hoping to control all this newfound power and make use of all the alleged knowledge he and his friends have gained watching science fiction movies.
They decide to proceed in baby steps, first going back just a few hours, then a few days.
And it works!
But in tampering with things that have occurred in the past that they would like to alter, by flying in the face of the time-travel paradox, they are jumping off the time-travel springboard that hovers over a pool of unintended consequences: the inevitable ripple effects, sometimes called the "butterfly effect," that accompany changing the past.
Memo to debuting South African director Dean Israelite, who in his first chance to direct works from a thoughtful script about second chances by Andrew Deutschman and Jason Harry Pagan: your subject matter, characters, and special effects are inherently interesting enough without all the handheld, shaky-cam footage, which grows tiresome (even though it is sometimes a legitimate distraction), lending the film a frenetic, chaotic quality that it could -– and should -- do without.
It could be argued that the film lacks ambition in the strictly teenage concerns it explores once the suspended-disbelief premise is established. But it plays fair, sticking to the rules it establishes at the outset.
So we'll chronicle 3 stars out of 4 for Project Almanac, a fanciful time-travel adventure that expands its target audience by turning us all into teens for the duration.