Year 14, Day 83 - 3/24/22 - Movie #4,085
BEFORE: Ryan Reynolds carries over again from "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard", and thanks for the recommendation, Netflix, your timing just couldn't be better - for once. And there's an article about this film in the issue of Entertainment Weekly I JUST got, and I stopped reading it yesterday RIGHT THERE because I knew I would be watching the movie later that night, and no spoilers.
But we're driving up to Massachusetts today, after I watch this film, so I'm going to be short on time tonight. So, quickly, here's the line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming for tomorrow, Friday, March 25:
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THE PLOT: After accidentally crash-landing in 2022, time-traveling fighter pilot Adam Reed teams up with his 12-year-old self for a mission to save the future.
AFTER: Ah, it's been a while since I've seen a good time-travel movie - last September I made some inroads into the topic with "Time Freak", which was a good one, and "My Future Boyfriend", which was a terrible one. For every "Bill & Ted Face the Music" that REALLY deals with the topic, there seems to also be a "Terminator: Dark Fate" which sort of tangentially involves characters time-traveling but doesn't really get into the logistics of it, the possible paradoxes and the implausibility of it all. Then you've got films like "An American Pickle" that don't REALLY involve time-travel, they just have work-around methods of getting a character from the past into the future, like through some form of suspended animation. Then last year there was also "Palm Springs", which was just characters stuck in a time-loop, and of course "Tenet" that just redefined the whole genre and blew everything else away.
Like "Tenet", the focus of this time-travel story is the invention of time travel itself, naturally that moment would become very important to all time-travelers, and as you might imagine, people from the future might use the device to travel backwards and mess with that watershed moment. This creates a paradox in and of itself, if someone were to use the time machine to travel back and prevent the process from being invented in the first place, and if they were to be successful, then how the hell did they travel back? Or what if somebody from the future took the schematics of the time machine back with them and gave them to the machine's inventor, before he invented it? Then, umm, who really invented it? I tried to write a story along these lines, it was quite ridiculous, with various future versions of the same person coming back from different future timelines, and alternately assisting with the inventor's plans or messing with the plans, or trying to convince him that inventing time travel was a terrible idea, or one with disastrous consquences. And as the inventor would flip-flop over whether or not to invent time-travel, various future versions of himself would blink out of existence. It was all quite ridiculous, but since the various incarnations of the inventor all met with him in a diner, I called the story "Adam and Eve on a Raft", which is of course diner slang.
I'm sure it's a coincidence that this film is called "The Adam Project", because I never published it or talked about this story publicly - for that matter, my story about futuristic robots all trying to travel back and kill Hitler as a baby was never published, either, and I had the perfect (?) title,too, which was "The Germanator". Get it? Hitler's mother would be a take on Sarah Conner, and an Edward Furlong type could play Hitler as a boy, think about it.
But "The Adam Project" instead involves a pilot from 2050 traveling back to 2022 and meeting himself as a boy. This plot's a good one, so SPOILER ALERT from this point on, if you haven't seen this one yet, please turn back NOW. He was trying to get back to 2018 to find his wife, who disappeared on a mission back to the past. Adam missed by a few years, but finds that his wife's been waiting through four years of real time (including the Trump years and the pandemic, presumably) for him to show up, but once he does, he learns that he's got to go back further, with younger Adam, to convince his own father to NOT follow through with his research, which would ultimately make time-travel possible, decades down the road.
There are potential paradoxes all over the place here, one should never meet one's younger self, because any contact like that could change history. Especially if Older Adam doesn't have a memory of meeting his future self when he was 12, that's a big warning sign right there. But anything a person does when they travel back in time could change history, or at least that's one theory, the fluid-reality theory. The other theory is the fixed reality theory, which states that the past can't be changed because it happened just that way, there's only one reality so traveling back will accomplish nothing, you can't save JFK from being shot, and you'll probably just end up helping out Lee Harvey Oswald, or worse, becoming Lee Harvey Oswald yourself.
Kids today are just too smart, I think - Adam immediately wants to know if this means that there's a multiverse, to which older Adam (and this movie) have the answer: "Shut up." This is kind of a cop-out, because then the film doesn't pick the fluid-reality theory or the fixed-reality theory, and instead they go with the "whatever makes the best movie" theory, which states that there simply MUST be a reason to go back in time, because it's so cool, so that means reality CAN be changed, the bad guys can go back and invest in Microsoft and Amazon, but then the good guys can go back AGAIN and through hard work, luck and unforeseen happenstance, change things back AGAIN. This is commonly known as the "Back to the Future II" codicil to time travel, which states that yes, a series of events happened and this needs to be respected, but not changing anything makes for a boring-ass movie, so screw it.
So the theory here is that yes, the future can be changed, and if you manage to change the past, then the future will adjust, but you won't just ZAP out of existence or blink back to your new timeline, I mean I guess that WILL happen, it just takes a few minutes. And very conveniently those paradoxes don't end up rupturing time or destroying the universe - but still, if you think about it, they're still THERE. Older Adam and Younger Adam go back in time, they prevent time travel from being invented, so great, it never exists, but then they never had the ability to travel back and do that, so then time travel WASN'T prevented from being invented, therefore maybe it WAS invented, and that just loops around ad infinitum.
I wish I could believe in time-travel, but I fall back on the facts - we're not aware of any time-travelers who walk among us, and there probably would be SOME feeling that things are working out for the best, and since Hitler was never killed as a baby, the pandemic was not prevented, 9/11 still happened and so on, I have to believe that time-travel will NEVER be invented, because this just can't be the best timeline possible, right? After all the time travelers screwing around, this is the BEST they could do? Also, the time travel we see depicted in books and movies is always through time to the same fixed point, but the truth is, there are no fixed points, the universe is always in motion. The earth moves around the sun, for example, and so if you time-travel from Boston in March back two months to Boston in January, the earth's not going to be in the same place, how does your time machine account for this? You'd end up floating in space, at a different point in Earth's orbit. You can't even treat the sun as a fixed reference point, but it's also moving around within the Milky Way galaxy, which is also moving, so forget it, it's impossible to calculate all that. You can't move in time and stay in the same point in space, the two are inextricably linked.
I wish I could just roll with it, because this movie would then be pretty cool and a lot of fun. It's got the same director as "Free Guy", Shawn Levy, and it looks like he gets along with Ryan Reynolds just fine, because he's going to be directing "Deadpool 3". Well, come on, let's go, what's the hold-up? I know Ryan Reynolds is busy, I just watched four of his films that came out in 2021 or 2022, but tick tock, let's get a move on.
And you just know I had to have a NITPICK POINT tonight, right, and once again, it's about bullies. Older Adam tells his younger self that he HAS to stand up to the bullies and fight them, and why does Hollywood keep making this mistake? A good kid punching out his bullies is no better than they are, and really, screenwriters are generally so creative, why is teaching a nerdy kid how to fight the best they can come up with? Bullies can be outsmarted, they can be killed with kindness, they can be snitched on, there simply MUST be other ways to deal with them then stooping to their level.
Also starring Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Catch and Release"), Zoe Saldana (last seen in "Get Over It"), Walker Scobell, Catherine Keener (last seen in "Walking and Talking"), Alex Mallari Jr., Braxton Bjerken, Kasra Wong, Donald Sales, Esther Ming Li, Ben Wilkinson, Milo Shandel, Isaiah Haegert.
RATING: 7 out of 10 baseball gloves
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