PROJECT ALMANAC (Dean Israelite 2015)

[Chris Knipp]

Dean Israelite: PROJECT ALMANAC (2015)


JONNY WESTON IN PROJECT ALMANAC

Too much to fix

Time travel and found footage are two gimmicks rich in possibilities. Project Almanac, focused on some smart teenagers finishing up high school in Atlanta, is so frenetic and angst-ridden (true also of the more original Chronicle, about boys who discover superpowers) that you forget to worry about who's holding the camera sometimes. This camera rushes around madly and takes a beating, like the one in the pulpy but ridiculously enjoyable high-speed alien-monster-invading-Manhattan film, Cloverfield. And it dwells on a young man who keeps going back to tweak a romance, like the British film by Richard Curtis, About Time. But like Shane Carruth's puzzling but smart Primer, it spends time on the building of the time machine. About Time cheats: like Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pligrim, "unstuck in time," its males just have the natural knack for jumping back and forth. That's not fair. We want to know the technology, even if it's hokey. Though basically an appealingly unassuming story about boys whose toys become dangerous, like J.J. Abrams' Super Eight, it's somewhat a shame Project Almanac (produced by Michael Bay) is so slick. Primer's DIY quality and minimal means added to the realism. After all, these are not NASA projects: they're cooked up in a basement or a garage, like the first Apple computers. Project Almanac is cooked up, not in a good way, but it still has entertainment value, if you ride with it, and it can make you enjoy vicariously, in retrospect, all the other better movies it borrows from.

David Raskin (charismatic up-and-comer Jonny Weston) is expecting to go to MIT, and he's not only fresh-faced and chisel-cheeked but super-smart. He and his two less dashing pals Quinn (Sam Lerner) and Adam (Allen Evangelista) are filmed by David's blonde sister Christina (Virginia Gardner), so often behind the camera we don't get to see her much. In an effort to get a better scholarship from MIT David delves into the home science lab of his father, who died in an accident right after David's seventh birthday party. Found footage of that party from ten years ago plays a key role in the events that follow. Through crashing a neighborhood party to borrow a special car battery, classmate Jessie (Sofia Black-D'Elia), who David has a crush on anyway, conveniently joins the group, quite sudden-like, and insists on staying and going on the group time-trips. The bold Jessie is the one who insists they skip testing their device with microorganisms and mice and jump in themselves, all five of them.

Largely a series of unrelated incidents, Project Almanac isn't quite up to earlier time travel movies like Time After Time (1979), Back to the Future (1985) or 12 Monkeys (1996), or the latter's immortal Chris Marker source, La jetée (1962). Marker worked magic using only voice-over narration and a series of stills. But movies like Project Almanac live and have their being through the more modern magic of digital editing techniques, without which their intricate frame-by-frame back-and-forth could not be done in such a complex and precise manner. And the use of this trickery and CGI can add pleasures the earlier films lacked.

Ultimately, Project Almanac still mostly reviews various standard tropes of time travel movies. The boys, who refer to Looper (another really clever time-travel movie, like Primer) as a favorite of theirs, say going back and getting rid of Hitler should be a first priority of any "temporal relocation" (as David's dad called his project). But that is the last thing that's going to happen in this very teenage-fantasy picture. Changing the world is dropped in favor of making the senior year of high school more glamorous. Ten years is as far as they can go back, more often just a few days or weeks. And mostly it's gaming the system. Instead of playing the market, like the guys in Primer, it's coming up with a winning lottery number. But the biggest deal -- inexplicable unless you're young, I guess -- is finagling VIP passes for the Lollapalooza summer music festival in Chicago's Grant Park. This becomes a seminal moment in David's romance with Jessie. He has a chance to say he's in love with her, but he misses it the first time through. (It's been said that the girls are sexist, generic portraits, but this ignores that Quinn and Adam too are mere appendages of David: it all revolves around him. Teenage boys' fantasies aren't egalitarian.)

Eventually -- this happens more dramatically in Chronicle -- the boys have a falling out when David breaks their pact of never time-traveling alone. This follows from another classic trope, the wish-making that goes wrong, so memorably illustrated in Stanley Donen's Bedazzled (remade three decades later by Harold Ramis). Be careful what you wish for; and likewise, be careful what you go back in time and change. You may cause a butterfly-effect ripple of other changes that could be disastrous.

Eventually David gets locked into an increasingly frantic and dangerous series of personal switch-backs, tweaking events and tweaking them again when he hasn't gotten them quite right. The anxious pace the movie gets into at this point is voluptuously intense. It acquires a breathless, hypnotic rhythm so absorbing you can forget, if you give in to the hyperactive digital editing, how silly some of the story's earlier episodes may have been.

Project Almanac, 105 mins., opens in a whole series of countries between November 2014 and Apriol 2015. Its US release date was 30 January 2015.