If you're a time-travel nerd like myself, Paramount's Project Almanac is the move you should definitely go and check out to tide you over until the new Terminator movie comes out this summer.
Produced on a $12 million budget, the movie has already surpassed that in it's first two weeks of release. Shot as a "found footage" film (much like 2012's Chronicle) Almanac tells the story of high school senior David Raskin (Johnny Weston) an aspiring inventor who dreams of going to MIT. His dream finally comes true when he gets his acceptance letter in the mail, yet his whole world comes crashing down when he only receives a $5,000 scholarship instead of the $40,000 he was hoping for. In order to help her son pay for his tuition, David's mother (Amy Landecker) decides to sell the house. While going through the attic with his sister Christina (Virginia Gardner) in order to find something their late father (Gary Weeks) might have left in order to help David get another scholarship, they both come across a video camera showing footage of David's 7th birthday. Surprisingly, David finds what appears to be a reflection of himself in a mirror within the footage.
Along with David's friends Adam Le (Allen Evangelista) and Quinn (Sam Lerner) the four of them find blueprints in David's basement for a "temporal relocation device" (AKA Time Machine) that his father had worked on before his death. When David's long-time crush Jessie (Sofia Black D'Elia) goes to a party in the neighborhood, David and his friends use the battery pack from Jessie's Prius to charge the machine and successfully they transport a toy car back in time by a few weeks. Eventually they are caught by Jessie, who decides to join the group.
After naming their experiment Project Almanac and laying a few ground rules (i.e. no one travels alone), the five teens have a bit of fun with their time-traveling device. My favorite time-traveling experiment of all in this film is when Quinn, who failed a chemistry presentation and is doomed to repeat his senior year, goes back to the day of his presentation over and over again until he finally passes. Another really fun moment is when Christina goes back to get back at a few girls who bully her at school by purposefully bumping and spilling drinks on them right after they made fun of the "present day" Christina ("I'm everywhere, bitch!" is the best line of the whole film). The gang even goes back a few months to check out Lallapalooza ("old" VIP passes were just five bucks each on E-Bay) and they event go on to win the lottery, which helps David pay for his college tuition and helps his mom keep their house (as a car fanatic, I love the part when Quinn checks out a Maseratti convertible on the show room floor).
Things start to go disarray, however, when David goes back in time to Lallapalooza by himself (essentially breaking one of the ground rules that he himself created) in order to make him and Jessie a couple. The plan works, but it also creates a ripple effect that causes a plane crash that kills over 700 people. Every time David goes back to try to fix it it causes another ripple effect that causes another terrible thing to happen. This is somewhat similar to The Butterfly Effect in which Ashton Kutcher's character travels to the past several times to correct things over and over again.
In an age of ever-constant superhero movies, Project Almanac is a breath of fresh air of originality. The movie is downright fun, and it's hard not to root for our five heroes whenever they succeed in their time-traveling experiments. Yet because the entire movie is shot camcorder style like the Paranormal Activity movies, the film can sometimes feel a little too jerky and cause a little bit of sickness, especially during scenes when their are running involved. Despite this, however, Almanac is the kind of time-traveling movie that time-traveling nerds like myself really need right now.
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