BEFORE: Here we go, my secret goal for ending the Kevin Hart chain with "Die Hart" was to allow Gary Weeks to carry over. He was also in "Ride Along", but to end with that film, I wouldn't have been able to include "Ride Along 2", or I'd have to watch #2 before #1 in that franchise, but that wouldn't make sense.
"Project Almanac" has been on my list for a very long time, perhaps longer than any film. Considering that I put it on a DVD with "Hot Tub Time Machine 2" that probably means it came into my possession in 2016 or 2017, but it could have been on the "Someday/Maybe" list even longer, since 2015 maybe. Anyway, the film is 10 years old so let's assume that it took me 8 or 9 years to get to it - apparently I'm nothing if not patient.
What I did was separate out all the time-travel films, like this and "Butterfly Effect 2" (and 3), then came "Paradox" and "Synchronicity" and a few others, but over time it was easier for me to link to the ones that were also romances, like "Needle in a Timestack", or with more popular actors, like "A Wrinkle in Time", but then in 2018 or 2019 I got more hardcore with the linking, and that left a few time-travel films stranded, as they're very hard to link to. Still, I managed to link to "Time Lapse" and "Time Freak" somehow, and then this year I snuck in "See You Yesterday", but still, the plan all started with THIS one, from 2014, and well, it's been a long road getting here, I hope it was worth the effort.
There's an outside chance I might be able to sneak another one or two in with horror movies in October, but it will take some more careful planning. If I don't, well, there's always next year, right?
FOLLOW-UP TO: "See You Yesterday" (Movie #4,698), "Time Freak" (Movie #3,941), "Time Lapse" (Movie #3,603)
THE PLOT: A group of teens discovers secret plans for a time machine, and construct one. However, things start to get out of control.
AFTER: Generally speaking, time-travel movies need to have some visual effects, but they don't have to be overdone. "Primer" just used a storage unit as the time machine, so they didn't need to do a lot of set construcion, just find a storage company willing to rent out a unit as a set. "Looper" had some pretty cool effects, if I remember correctly (it's past time for a rewatch, no doubt)
AFTER: Generally speaking, time-travel movies need to have some visual effects, but they don't have to be overdone. "Primer" just used a storage unit as the time machine, so they didn't need to do a lot of set construcion, just find a storage company willing to rent out a unit as a set. "Looper" had some pretty cool effects, if I remember correctly (it's past time for a rewatch, no doubt)
Time travel movies also seem to work best when the travelers are trying to accomplish something, like maybe saving the world - so "Project Almanac" kind of turns that requirement around by giving the ability to time-travel to a group of teenagers, and even though they start out with the best intentions - David Raskin needs a sizzle reel that will get him a scholarship to go to MIT - before long the teenagers are tempted to use the device to better their grades, or get revenge on a bully, or go to the Imagine Dragons concert three months ago. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
To be fair, there are some constraints here that narrow down what they're able to do, or rather WHEN they're able to do it. At first the device can only bring them back one day, then refinements bring the potential travel up to three weeks in the past. (Apparently the device can't travel forward to events that haven't happened yet, or else they don't consider using the device this way...). So going back and killing Hitler as a baby is off the table from the start, and thus the film neatly avoids the paradox that would be created by changing a notable historical event. (The paradox is, If they go back and kill baby Hitler, they also eliminate the NEED to kill Hitler in the first place, so they've changed reality to one that they didn't need to fix, therefore in the new reality they never did or will do that, because they would exist in a reality where that didn't need to be done, so they didn't go back and do that, so Hitler would be alive again.)
The whole thing starts when ambitious science high-school nerd David finds his late father's video camera, and while watching footage of his own seventh birthday party (which was the day before his father died in a car crash) David spots someone in the footage that looks exactly like 17-year-old him, watching the party from the other room. But how could 17-year-old David be at the party for 7-year old David? And why is he carrying a strange backpack, why does he have that stain on his shirt, and overall, WTF? This leads David and his two friends to search his father's lab, where they find a copy of the guvmint's instructions on how to build a time machine. And they know that it MUST be successful, because how else would David be able to crash his own birthday party 10 years ago?
(Finding someone else's instructions neatly avoids another paradox, because if someone in the future invents a time machine, it would be so easy for them to go back in time, meet their younger self and deliver those schematics, and then we'd all be wondering who invented the time machine, the older guy or the younger version of himself.)
The three nerds stay up all night in the basement for weeks, wiring circuit boards and searching for ways to get more power to the machine, sacrificing gaming consoles and other home electronics, stealing power from car batteries, etc. NITPICK POINT: What they really needed here was a Marty McFly line of dialogue here, something like, "Wait a minute, are you telling me you built a time machine.... out of an XBOX?" David, who's very inept when it comes to talking with girls, manages to make contact with Jessie, thanks to a back-pack mix-up and also from getting caught draining her car's battery with jumper cables. So the three male nerds, along with Jessie and David's sister Christina (who mans the video camera for most of this "found footage" movie, so we hardly ever see her) end up driving out to the woods and jumping back 24 hours, just to have proof of concept. When they return, they accidentally bring the neighbor's dog forward in time with them, and then they notice that the street is filled with "Lost Dog" flyers that weren't there before. This is proof that they were able to change reality with their actions, the dog being missing for 24 hours caused its owners to print up flyers.
This should have been the end of things, surely proving to the enrollment board at M.I.T. that time travel is possible should have secured David both entry and a scholarship, but of course the teens don't stop there. They go back in time with the winning lotto numbers in order to save the Raskin house from foreclosure, and while it didn't work exactly as they'd planned, it was at least a partial success. Then they use time travel to beat the science teacher's impromptu morning questions, and after that, they're only interested in becoming more popular at school. Umm, sure, that's noble, right? But then David gets the idea to buy some "useless" backstage passes for that Imagine Dragons concert three months ago, and treats his friends by taking them back to when those items were still valid. Fine, but couldn't he have picked a better band? I mean, really....were the Rolling Stones not on tour that year?
It's when David realizes that he missed an opportunity to kiss Jessie, and then goes back to fix it, that things start to really go off the rails. The film avoids the other time-travel paradox of "What happens when you encounter your past self, but you don't have any memory from your past self of meeting your future self?" (think about it, you'll get there...) by showing that when your current self gets too close to your past self, you both get caught in some kind of feedback loop, and one of you "glitches" out, and apparently eventually ceases to exist, and paradox therefore averted. Umm, I'm not sure the universe works this way, but whatever, the teens then have to learn to avoid the "glitch" by removing the past self from the equation, like getting him dismissed from school or sending him on a wild goose-chase errand, or just shoving him in a locker for a while, any solution will do. But this leads to NITPICK POINT #2 because they show that it takes like 47 tries for Allen to beat the science teacher's questions, and that means that they had to distract the past Allen 46 times, or there are 47 future Allens walking around the school at the same time, or shoved in to 47 lockers, and that's a lot of chances for that glitch thing to happen.
Eventually the teens realize that their messing around with reality has done more harm than good, somehow robberies and arsons are increased in the area (hmm, it could be all those stupid time travelers stealing machine parts and hydrogen, just a thought) but also the school has lost the championship basketball game, and also there was a plane crash in Europe that could have been caused by the "butterfly effect" resulting from one of their trips through time. (It's complicated, I won't get into it here...). So eventually David realizes that he has to go back, way back, and make sure that he never discovered those plans for the machine in the first place.
This takes him back to - you guessed it - that birthday party, which is essentially a fait accompli, but at least he gets to see his father one more time, and his father gets to meet 17-year-old David, and if you wonder why David didn't tell his father more about the future or his own fate, well, just watch "The Flash" from last year, the reasoning is essentially the same, just a little less complicated here. Really, this is right on point with Father's Day coming up, so it's one more piece of evidence that my chain has a mind of its own, or else it's all just coincidence. Future David blinks out, and reality returns to one where he never gets into M.I.T. or invents time travel - or does it? Unfortunately there are still paradoxes that result here - and some screenwriter tried SO HARD to avoid them!
Well, the benefit of me taking so long to watch "Project Almanac" is that even though I burned it to DVD eight or nine years ago, the movie scrolled off cable, was not available for some time, but now it's BACK on premium cable channels, either Starz or Paramount/Showtime, I think. So I was able to watch it On Demand, plus with subtitles, and right now you can too!
Also starring Jonny Weston (last seen in "Taken 3"), Sofia Black-D'Elia (last seen in "The Promise"), Sam Lerner (last seen in "Nobody Walks"), Allen Evangelista, Virginia Gardner, Amy Landecker (last seen in "Clear History"), Macsen Lintz (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Gary Grubbs (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), Michelle DeFraites, Jamila Thompson (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Katie Garfield (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Courtney Bowers, Patrick Johnson, Joshua Brady (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Danielle Rizzo, Mychael Bates (last seen in "Frankie and Johnny"), Onira Tares, Mani Yarosh, Andrew Benator (last seen in "Game Night"), Aaron Marcus (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Andre Nemec, Anthony Reynolds (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Brett David Stelter, Cameron Fuller (last seen in "Barley Lethal"), Derrin Jordan with a cameo from Imagine Dragons.
RATING: 7 out of 10 trips on the water slide
No comments:
Post a Comment