The month of January, to movie fans, is cursed. This month is the hangover to the holiday season, where studios squeeze out projects they have little faith in, usually low-budget pictures that need little effort to make a profit. With eyes focused on the Oscar nominees, these movies pay the rent and keep the studio's lights on. Some films can escape the black fog ("Paddington" comes to mind), but more often than not, they all succumb to boredom, laziness, and product placement. And here's...another one!
"Project Almanac" follows David (Jonny Weston), an engineering whiz, who along with his sister, Christina (Virginia Gardner), and friends Jessie (Sofia Black-D'Elia), Quinn (Sam Lerner) and Alex (Allen Evangelista), discover blueprints for a time machine David's father worked on before his mysterious death. The teenagers manage to construct the machine and time travel shenanigans ensue.
This film joins the already-abundant assembly of time travel movies with one calling card: it's integrated with the found-footage genre. Christina often serves as the movie's videographer; she's instructed by David to "film everything" to keep track of the building process and time travel excursions, in case they need to refer back to any missteps. Outside of technical inconsistencies (least of which being, the studio-quality sound and picture originating from a 2004 camera), "found-footage" revolves around the concept that a third party has "found" and compiled the video together, usually in an attempt to explain any particular phenomenon. In this film, there is no third party. "The Blair Witch Project" gave us a title card explaining the police investigation. In "Cloverfield," the video was seized by the government. However, "Project Almanac" restricts the point-of-view to the teenagers, which is fine for the story, but doesn't serve the found-footage concept. This decision ends up looking like a quick justification for slashing the budget, a dangerous trend for Hollywood these days...
No movie has ever had a consensus from the scientific community about the accuracy of time travel, and until (if even possible) we achieve it, trying to accommodate a dexterous knowledge of the subject in film will always have inconsistencies. I've accepted this, and am willing to forgive a movie for errors if it sticks to entertaining me with all the possibilities time travel can offer. However, "Project Almanac" is padded, its second half littered with dancing montages and romantic subplots. The teens use time travel for personal gain (winning the lottery, dealing with bullies, etc.), which is fun, initially, but after forty minutes of watching other people party and play with GoPro cameras, my eyes tend to glaze and reach deeper inside my bucket of popcorn. As soon as these scenes end, the movie rushes through the third act, as if it realizes how much time it spent meandering and attempts to wrap everything loosely to not be late.
"Project Almanac" isn't awful: the cast shows good chemistry and there are decent performances from Weston and Black-D'Elia. It just doesn't stand out from others of its genre, and when the film references "Looper" or "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", it makes me want to see those movies instead. Add in the shameless product placement and I chalk this one up as yet-another victim of the January curse. Skip it and take another trip in the DeLorean instead. Thank you all for reading; I'm the Man Without A Plan, signing off.
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