Project Almanac (2015)
Certified: 106 minutes
Directed by: Dean Israelite
Starring: Jonny Weston, Sofia Black D’Elia, Sam Lerner, Allen Evangelista, Virginia Gardner, Amy Landecker, Gary Weeks, Michelle DeFraites, Patrick Johnson, Gary Grubbs
KRS Releasing Ltd

Time travel has always been tricky business and in Project Almanac all the tricks and perils are on show. David (Jonny Weston) is a science wizard and has just been accepted into MIT.

His joy is shared by those around him, including his younger sister Chris (Ginny Gardner) and his nerdish friends Adam and Quinn (Allen Evangelista and Sam Lerner). However, he needs to find the funds to get in.

He thus goes through his father’s stuff which has been stored in the attic since he passed away. There he finds a video camera with footage of David’s birthday when he was still seven.

Upon examining the video, David sees a mirror and in its reflection he sees himself in his teenage years just as he is at present.

David’s father had been doing work for the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and when he starts to search intensively with the help of his sister and friends, they find more papers and also an engine that looks like a time machine but which needs quite an amount of power.

The group realise that they have a discovery on their hands. They rope in Jessie (Sofia Black-D’Elia), a girl on whom David has a crush and who has a hybrid car that has batteries strong enough to power up the time machine’s engine. They decide to go back in time for three objectives: win the lottery, Quinn getting a better mark in his chemistry grade and payback on a bully.

When they go back to the Lollapalooza festival, David realises he had a chance with Jessie and he blew it. Thus, instead of travelling in a group, he goes back solo and makes amends. When he returns to the present, he discovers that Jessie is now his girlfriend but the changes made have led to a very different present. The more he tries to arrange things, the more everything goes downhill.

Project Almanac is a combination of found footage, time travel and teen-oriented plot. It succeeds more than one would have thought possible. The fact that producer Michael Bay did not meddle so much in this film’s making and his over-the-top signature marks are thankfully absent, adds to the film’s benefit.

The film instead focuses on the teenagers and it portrays them quite realistically. It presents time travel issues in an intelligent manner even though the loopholes of the genre are difficult to avoid, but the film as a whole makes sense in its setting, execution and structure.

From the cast, Weston is a revelation: he emits both charisma and likeability as he goes through the time travel motions with increasing despair and urgency. This ends up being very crucial as with every time travel jump, the problems increase and the audience will want to have someone with whom to associate and he is the ideal vehicle for this.

Where for many other films, the found footage genre has become repetitive, here it works. There is a sense of discovery with every new scenario that unfolds as opposed to simply delivering another low-budget shock. The special effects that accompany such sequences are well carried out and are not there simply for the sake of showing off or as eye candy.

The most recent movie I can compare Project Almanac to is Chronicle (2012), which had however focused on super-heroics. Here it’s interesting to listen and hear the teen discussions. These geeks are self-aware and their references and homage to Hollywood presentations of time travel are mandatory and happily welcome.

With each ripple effect of time travel, there is an increase in energy, urgency and eye-opening revelations which make Project Almanac an unusually gripping affair.