Project Almanac

(2014) ★½

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Filmed in the fidgety style of Earth to Echo and Chronicle, a handy cam account of genius nerd Jonny Weston’s adventures with a time machine,built after discovering his dead dad’s ‘temporal relocation’blueprints in the basement. He wants to go back ten years, to his seventh birthday, the day dad died in a car crash after receiving an urgent phone call.

“When you said time machine,” says girlfriend Sofia Black-D’Elia, “I thought dinosaurs or at least Woodstock.” His sister Ginny Gardner holds the camera and, like all the other girls who attend their highschool, she’s smokin’ hot. This is an MTV/Michael Bay production, so you’re either getting the best or worst of both worlds,depending on your IQ.

The actual process is a mess of pixel break-up and sound distortion in a mini-maelstrom (or maybe a defective dvd)and the initial ‘experiments’ focus on old school scores and winning lottery tickets. This is time travel with tunnel vision. Taking into account Weston’s objective and the high old time his friends have,‘temporal relocation’ is quite literally party time.

Until the‘butterfly effect’ kicks in (too little, too late, in terms of narrative momentum). Maybe not as puerile as Jumper but still pretty trivial. And the subjective camerawork consistently fails the ‘who’s filming this now?’ test. Although Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is referenced in a TV clip, Project Almanac is rarely lighthearted and certainly not amusing.

It never approaches the wit or ingenuity of the sweetly comical series of timeline contradictions in the 2005 Japanese highschool adventure Summer Time Machine Blues. Now that was a trip.

Certificate: 12

Duration: 106min

IMDB – Project Almanac

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