PROJECT ALMANAC (2015)

Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Director: Dean Israelite
Cast:  Jonny Weston, Sofia Black D'Elia, Amy Landecker, Michelle DeFraites, Ginny Gardner and Sam Lerner
Runtime: 1 hr 47 mins
Rating: PG13 (Brief Coarse Language)
Released By: UIP
Official Website: http://www.projectalmanac.com/

Opening Day: 29 January 2015

Synopsis: A brilliant high school student and his friends uncover blueprints for a mysterious device with limitless potential, inadvertently putting lives in danger.

Movie Review:

The brains behind Project Almanac try to breathe new life into the now-stale teen movie genre. The genre’s offerings are rather slim as of late.  Movie goers now get to choose from either dystopian flicks with flashy good-looking leads, or heart-wrenching dramas with good-looking actors made up to look… plain. Project Almanac tries to find a middle ground – it has a believable cast of young adults with decent acting chops, it has sci-fi action and romance, it has a great soundtrack that everyone could get into. However, the plot of the film is embarrassingly trashy and honestly not worth a trip to the cinema.

 Project Almanac toys with the idea of time travel. It stars Jonny Weston as David Raskin, a senior in high school hoping to get into MTI on a scholarship. David is often seen hanging out with his sister (Virginia Gardner - she is in almost every scene of the film and yet so forgettable) and friends Quinn (Sam Lerner) and Adam (Allen Evangelista). David discovers a video camera that belonged to his late father and views the footage of his 7^th birthday (the last birthday that he spends with father). He then notices that his 17 year old self is present in the footage, and scrambles to unlock his father’s secret basement laboratory and finds his father’s time travel machine. David falls in love with his high school crush, Jessie (Sofia Black D’Elia), unlocks the secrets of time-travel, and gets into some serious trouble. This makes up the rest of Project Almanac.

There were some enjoyable moments in the film. When David and crew manage to figure out the time-travel machine, they start to list down what they would like a second chance at. This was the most exciting part of the film – teenage kids using time-travel to explore endless possibilities. Predictably, all of them collectively decide to go back in time and win the lottery – a particularly enjoyable scene where the kids splurge their money on cars, repeating quizzes till scoring well, and attending Lollapalooza (a very important music fest for American teens; attendance is a status symbol). However, it is rather silly that David, the supposed genius of the lot decides to expend his energy on time-travel on something as basic as winning the lottery.

Nonetheless, these shallow sequences were important to theme of escapism. The movie let the audience fantasize about what part of their own history they would like to rewrite if they were given the opportunity. Too bad this was cut short; as the movie’s plot moved on to explore the ill effects of time-travel. Somehow, something as trivial as attending Lollapalooza ended up having dire consequences on the characters – David’s mom doesn’t get a job, Adam is hospitalized, planes crash and most importantly, David ends up losing the girl he loves. Of course, the link between time travel and the unfortunate circumstances are never clearly explained. Eventually, David ends up make making all the wrong “time travel moves” in an attempt to make things right again, and reaches the conclusion that in order for things to be right again, he has to destroy his father’s machine.

There were also some ridiculous choices made in the film. For some strange reason, the director decides to present the film in found footage. Director Dean Israelite employs this obvious gimmick to make the thin plot seem more exciting and palatable, but ended up being the source of a massive headache throughout the film. The shaky camera coupled with giddy time travel sequences left the audience so nauseous that it was hard to care about what happened next. The emotional moments of the film were artificial and cold. When David decides to travel back in time to see his father, his father immediately recognizes 17 year old David as his son. This incredible leap of faith his father takes when he sees a strange teenage boy at his 7 year old son’s birthday party is just one of the many frustrating things about Project Almanac.

To summarize, here’s a Top 5 list of why you shouldn’t watch the film.

1.     The cringe-worthy flirting scenes between David and Jessie – there is a line in the film where Jessie asks David “Are you picturing me naked?” and David awkwardly giggles. The writers obviously got very creative.

2.     Christina– she is the source of no entertainment, and is somehow given the task of filming every little thing that happens to David, even private conversations between David and his mother. I still wonder why the people behind Project Almanac decided to give a minor character the important role of filming everything.

3.     Lack of logic– Project Almanac skips over all the important details. For example, when explaining temporal relocation, the main characters just gloss over the concept and spew up some mumbo-jumbo physics related terms and BAM! They are overnight experts on the electromagnetic fields and the time-space continuum

4.     Bad Script– David reunites with his dead father, and it is never explained why his father decided to leave his kid’s birthday party urgently to go to the basement. Predictably, the time travel machine is linked to a high security, obscure American Defence Agency.

5.     Alternatives– If you want to watch a great teen flick on Time Travel, you could always catch Back to the Future or Groundhog Day.

Movie Rating:

(Only watch if you are really, really bored. )

Review by Aishwarya Kumar