Official Synopsis
A brilliant high school student (Jonny Weston, The Divergent Series: Insurgent) and his friends who discover blueprints for a machine that can send them back in time. They soon rewrite history to win the lottery, ace exams, and party like there’s no tomorrow. But by changing the past, they have threatened the future of our world. Can they undo the damage they have unleashed before it’s too late?
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Project Almanac starts out well. It has all the markings of a fun, inventive feature about time travel. Kind of in the same vein as Chronicles, where you get to see what young kids would do with great power, but with a little dab of creepy Paranormal Activity (just in the way it was shot and treated). The notion of a kid stumbling upon an unfinished technology that could significantly change the world is nothing short of fascinating.
Time travel stories are a tricky thing, just ask Terminator and Back to the Future producers. The start of the film is fine, the finish is fine, but the middle has to be handled with care, which might be the problem with Project Almanac.
Anyway, let’s break this one down.
The first act starts out well enough. David (Jonny Weston) is a brilliant kid that is trying to make his way into the scientific community, and mainly into MIT. Sadly, his widowed mom cannot afford the price tag on MIT admittance initially, but manages to find a way by selling the home they live in. Guilt-ridden, David tries to find a way to save the house and his family. In the process of trying to find a solution, David stumbles on some old footage of his seventh birthday, which reveals something frightening he had never seen before — himself as a teenager in the background. Flustered and trying to figure out why, David stumbles upon an old experiment in the basement his father was putting together for DARPA called Project Almanac, a temporal displacement device (time travel).
The first act is creepy, funny and sets up the other two acts brilliantly. While certainly there is some necessity to suspend one’s belief that teenagers would happen upon something in the basement of a house they’ve been living in for years, and somehow find the know-how to put together a complicated piece of equipment that allows for time travel, the ride is still entertaining up to this point. The first act throws everything together properly, even the character development of David and his ragtag friends, including his love interest Jessie (Sofia Black-D’Elia).
As the second act begins, the movie sort of shows its sporadic hand at organizing how everything is going to be and how time travel affects the group’s lives.
The second act starts by the group taking baby steps at experimenting with the newly formed time travel device. First, they try it on inanimate objects, then they quickly move to trying it out as a group. The group shifts from minor jumps to bigger jumps, depending on the configuration of the machine. The first time they jump back a few hours. The second time they jump back three months, and into a ballin’ concert. During the concert, something happens between David and Jessie, which causes David to go rogue and jump back by himself (a group no-no). His solo jump causes a ripple in his group’s respective timeline and causes unintended consequences.
The second act is entertaining, especially at the beginning. It has a lot more dumb fun to it than it does serious drama, which eventually creates a feeling of impending doom about the story. The second act has issues once the drama begins and specifically when David’s solo jump screws up things in a tragic way. The story never outright explains why his ripple in time causes such catastrophe. We are told through bits and pieces that something happened at point A, which caused this tragedy at point B, but it is never fully explained how and why this occurred. I don’t want to give too much away, but you’ll see for yourself.
As the movie presses on and David’s situation worsens with every jump he makes to help correct the past, the movie doesn’t fully dive into any of the reasons why his time traveling is causing such drastic changes in people’s lives. Being movie goers who have seen time travel in other films, we can all understand that yes there are consequences for changing the past, but generally the reasons are explained (see Back to the Future trilogy for complicated details). Director Dean Israelite and writers Jason Pagan and Andrew Deustchman seem incredibly uninterested in dealing with the finer details to this story. They seem to almost skip the ‘why’ and just go straight to the end result in hopes of the audience forgiving them. It’s strange, and it’s a bit frustrating considering how good the opening act was of Project Almanac.
Anyway, the pedal is firmly planted to the metal with the story at this point and the filmmakers seem only interested in giving you bits of drama and some intriguing moments, but in no way feel compelled in providing details of how all the mistakes are taking place.
Because of this very strained second act that is lacking in specifics, and you have to have specifics when attempting time travel stories, the third act is predictable and almost welcomed (the movie gives you hope that all will be explained). It certainly is put together well and wraps up things nicely, and ends on a weird note, but the beef of the story between the buns of act one and three is so incredibly not thought out that third act just doesn’t have the emotional impact that it should. I won’t ruin it for you, but it ends how you think it would end — though there is a tiny twist.
Project Almanac isn’t a disaster, but it is an example of how a potentially great movie could have been so much more than it ended up. As it stands, the first and third acts are great, as is the character development, but the movie simply can’t or won’t handle the details in the middle to make it more than just a fun romp through time, which is incredibly disappointing on so many levels.
On the Blu-ray side of the equation, the way it was filmed (shaky-cam) hurt the visuals a bit, but the overall transfer to HD was solid. There are some visually shaky moments (no pun intended) during the night scenes that cause some blur in the picture. There is also just a smidgen of color banding issues, but no real graininess or artifacts to be had. Overall, the colors come through brilliantly when you can see them long enough and some of the locations are gorgeous, which lend well to HD.
On the special features side of the tracks, here’s what you’re getting:
– Alternate Opening
– Deleted Scenes
– Alternate Endings
Commentary and featureless on the production would have been great and added some value to the end product. What you get here is appropriate for a movie of this type, though I wish it was just a bit more beefy.