Time traveling selfies in found-footage thriller Project Almanac
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
"Time travel 101."
City Paper grade: D
Their gadget's limited ten-year capacity means that the teenage time travelers of Project Almanac can't go back and kill Hitler, which one of them immediately mentions as "time travel 101." It might be just enough time to make the movie's found-footage gimmick feel fresh, however, though audiences in the faded past of 2005 would still recognize lifts from the likes of Back to the Future and Explorers. Dean Israelite's contribution to the increasingly bloated shot-on-the-fly genre canon features a decent set-up: MIT prospect David (Jonny Weston) recognizes his present self in a home movie from his own 7th birthday, leading to the discovery that his late father had been secretly tinkering on a DARPA "temporal relocation" doo-dad. Despite his boy genius qualities, David and a couple of buddies use the time machine to right the wrongs of high school, a premise that might work better with a John Hughes-like comedic touch than as a serious thriller. But soon enough, the butterfly effect leads to some unexpected consequences in the present, and David must decide between reversing large-scale tragedies and the love of a popular girl. For all its more obvious influences, Project Almanac is most indebted to Chronicle, a more successful attempt to reframe an action genre with teen awe and angst. But that film set up defined characters corrupted by superpowers, where Israelite just tosses out a trio of obnoxious, socially awkward teens whose leering handheld cameras show something other than science on their minds.
