Project Almanac Movie Blurb by Shale January 31, 2015 I saw the trailers for this PG-13 movie and being a sucker for sci-fi had to see it. It is a time travel story involving teens and I suspect that is its intended audience. it didn't do well by the aggregate critics of Rotten Tomatoes, only 36% gave it a "fresh" and only 54% of audiences liked it. The critic consensus was: "Project Almanac isn't without wit or originality, but its thin story and irritating found-footage camerawork ultimately make it difficult to recommend." Yeah, this is one of those movies filmed almost entirely on personal video cams, chronicling these kids discovery of how to make a time machine and how they deal with it. First it opens with the brilliant kid, David Raskin (Jonny Weston) demonstrating his drone being controlled by devices on his fingers instead of the control panel. This is an innovation that he hopes will get him into MIT. It is being filmed by his sister Christina (Virginia Gardner) with his two friends Adam Le (Allen Evangelista) and Quinn Goldberg (Sam Lerner) assisting. While cleaning out some of his father Ben Raskin's (Gary Weeks) stuff in the attic, he finds an old video cam with the last video at his 7th birthday party a decade ago. This was the last day he saw his dad who died in a car wreck. While watching the video he notices a fleeting reflection in the hall mirror at their house and it turns out to be him at 17 wearing the same clothes that he now has. David in Mirror Well the only explanation for this is time travel and the four teens search thru his dad's work in the basement and find parts and charts to some military device his dad was working on. At this point you know they get it to work because 17-year-old David was at his 7th birthday party. First Test of Device Here the movie went into Teen Mode, not as bad as Weird Science, but the usual "What will we do with this power?" Of course getting back at school rivals, going back and passing a failing grade, winning the lottery are all ideas to explore. Christina mentioned going back and watching the first run of Star Wars. That let me know the generational divide because I did that in 1977 and it was AWESOME! However, apparently none of these nerdy kids thot to go back to 2004 and on their way to David's B'day party go watch The Butterfly Effect. They did start out considering all the things that they could not do to keep from altering the future but nuances do occur and things do seem to get out of hand when kids get a serious toy to play with. And all for the benign reason of David, the shy nerd boy who was always too afraid to approach his main school crush Jessie Pierce (Sofia Black D'Elia). 2nd Chance at Love It wasn't a bad movie and I can see it being more appreciated by a younger audience because some of the scenes of teen stuff I would have fast-forwarded if it had been a video. It did satisfy the temporal paradox tho, the time that 17-year-old David was at his 7th birthday party.
Its low budget though isnt it. It seems trickier to sniff them out nowadays, cos the cgi is cheaper, easier to produce, looks good, but the rest of the movie sucks. I fell for it with Into the Storm. This one smells like one of those
