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TIME travel. One of the staples of science fiction and the influence of a plethora of films, books and shows.
It’s one of mankind’s greatest fantasies, but also the cause of enormous debate. There’s nothing quite like a new time-bending thriller to have fans furiously forging essays and bashing out long-winded synopses to create a smooth timeline and iron out plot holes and paradoxes.
Project Almanac starts off doing things right. It has an interesting premise and brings some fresh ideas to the table, but its ideas get too big and it makes a right hash of its ending. In this genre, when you’ve woven an intricate web but can’t tie it up with a satisfying resolution, that’s very bad.
The plot starts simply enough; high school student and aspiring inventor David Raskin (Weston) wins a place at a top university thanks to his scientific genius, but is not granted a scholarship.
In order to pay the tuition fees, David searches through his late father’s assortment of junk in the basement, hoping to find something to make which can wow the university’s professors one last time.
Instead, David finds a camcorder containing footage of his seventh birthday party, the last time he saw his father alive. Almost as incredibly as the thing still having enough battery power to turn on, David sees a reflection of his older self in a mirror within the footage.
Digging further and finding blueprints for a ‘temporal relocation device’ (a time machine to you and I), David and his group of buddies realise they can go back in time and have endless fun changing their life situation. However, they start to realise that this has more serious consequences than they can imagine.
For a while, Project Almanac is a lot of fun as the likeable group of science nerds do what any youngster being able to time travel would do and get up to all sorts of mischief (good-natured at least). While the characters are painted in broad strokes (there’s the stereotypical science boffin who always has the answer, the preposterously attractive girl, the quiet bullied one who ends up fighting back), this doesn’t mean we don’t care about them as their natural charisma and obvious bond shines through.
The fact that a relatively unknown cast was used no doubt helps the characters be more believable, as we focus on their actions rather than themselves. They make mistakes and frankly, some incredibly stupid decisions, but they’re kids who have just discovered time travel so their erratic and emotionally-driven nature can be forgiven. A strong undercurrent of humour runs through the film too; I often found myself chuckling at their withering put-downs and hugely bloated egos now they know they can cheat on any test and win the lottery.
However, about halfway through, things start to go downhill fast. Funnily enough, this is just about the same time that the film takes an obvious U-turn in tone. During an overlong scene set at a popular music festival (which seems more concerned with promoting the handful of bands name-dropped with sycophantic verve by the characters), David makes a face-palm-worthy decision that he immediately regrets and decides to go back in time alone and change.
This causes a butterfly effect in the present day, and the naivety and reckless abandon that was so enjoyable early on is lost as the true consequences of wielding such an ability takes a turn for the dramatic.
The film quite simply loses its fun, while logical threads get increasingly tangled and the whole thing becomes a labyrinth of inconsistency that leads to a plodding resolution and a thoroughly dissatisfying ending. It’s hard to say why without spoiling it, but I certainly left the screening wishing the kids had just carried on doing daft things before the whole ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ shtick kicks in.
Furthermore, the ‘found footage’ nature of the camera work (the whole film is meant to be from the handheld camera the group is using to document their exploits) can be very jarring at first and can easily make you dizzy. If shaky camera work gives you a headache, I’d recommend giving this one a miss.
There’s also some obvious cheating going on, with the occasional camera angle being so obviously set up and fixed that it makes no sense. Clearly, the director was hoping you’d be paying too much attention to the on-screen events that you wouldn’t notice.
Overall, Project Almanac starts off brilliantly, and if it had kept to the same youthful, human tone throughout, it would be spoken about for a while to come. However, once it starts getting into the meat and potatoes of the story, the pitfalls of the paradoxical nature of time travel are navigated poorly and the whole thing becomes a dog’s dinner.
