Project
Almanac
This
is why we need to bring back Star Trek. If you ever watched the
show, you would know you can’t go messing around with the past!
It’s, like, the second or third directive!
Jonny “Can I buy an H to spell my name correctly” Weston
stars as David - a super smart kid who wants to get into MIT. He
struggles with the devastating, untimely death of his father, and
mom’s financial difficulties, but our hero does get accepted in
to the school. However, David doesn't secure enough scholarship money
to cover the costs.
Seeking some amazing experiment or project that will win him a full
ride, David and his sister, Christina (Virginia Gardner), dig around
Dad’s old lab and find a possible time machine (they are so lucky
Dad used to work for a secretive government contractor or something).
Because this is a movie about teenagers for teenagers, David, Christina
and their pals, Adam (Allen Evangelista) and Quinn (Sam Lerner), make
it work using stuff found around the house and stolen from school (you
won’t look at your PS4 the same way again).
The gang, along with the prettiest gal in school, Jessie (Sofia
Black-D’Elia), start jumping through time to do fun stuff like
winning the lottery and attending music festivals with VIP passes, but
soon realize they are impacting more than their own lives.
Can they go back in time and put their reality back on the path they
once knew?
Project Almanac starts off fine, but the
creative team struggles to find a satisfying, logical ending.
Director Dean Israelite and writers Andrew Deutschman and Jason Pagan
present a fun, adventurous movie with a kooky comical tone to it.
It’s all about goofy teenagers living out wish fulfillment in the
way teenagers would.
However, the team has no clue where it is going. Israelite and company
take far too long to get to the drama. They might as well have stayed
with a comical movie where the kids are laughing it up as they play
pranks on themselves and exact revenge on those who wronged them.
That’s entertaining and best suits the one dimensional characters
presented here.
Yet, Project Almanac gets bogged down by inserting drama about
the damage done as these kids gallivant all over the time space
continuum. David spirals out of control with no real plan to right
those wrongs, and even the audience is left confused about what is real
and what needs to be fixed.
Worst of all, the ending is a mess and needs better writing as we hit a
poignant moment that could have meant the world if scripted better with
appropriate, emotional dialogue for the characters. It’s a moment
for growth for David that could have helped him evolve beyond being a
kid obsessed with teen obsessions, but it is lost to make way for a
forced happy ending because they learn nothing from what just happened.
Project
Almanac is rated PG-13 for some
language and sexual content.
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