Project Almanac

Time travel. Wow! Hollywood has certainly covered this particular topic many times over. We've seen dramas, comedies, thrillers and mysteries surrounded around this topic and always...always they are fraught with time paradoxes. Sorry, you cannot avoid them. They always happen when dealing with time travel--one can't help it. So, when I saw "Project Almanac" after the first 30 minutes, I thought, yeah, there are time paradoxes involved here, otherwise you can't explain away certain happenings.

A brilliant high school student, David Raskin (Jonny Weston) and his friends, Jessie Pierce (Sophia Black-D'Elia), Quinn Goldberg (Sam Lerner), Adam Le (Allen Evangelista) and David's sister, Christina (Virginia Gardner) accidentally stumble upon blueprints for a mysterious device with limitless potential. As they probe into the situation even more, they realize they have come upon the blueprints that involve time travel, or more precisely, a time machine device. Through improvising using different tools they find at Home Depot and the like, they decide to build it and use it to fix their problems and for personal gain. But, once built and they start to use it, the future starts falling apart with certain disasters. It becomes so horrific of a situation that as each of them start disappearing little by little, they must travel back to the past to make sure they never invent the machine in the first place, or face possible destruction of humanity.

Others to round out the cast are Amy Landecker as Kathy Raskin, David and Christina's mom, Gary Weeks as David and Christina's dad, Gary Grubbs as Dr. Lou, David and friend's teacher, Michelle DeFraites as Sarah Nathan, Christina's bully, Macsen Lintz as David, Age 7, and Courtney Bowers as Jess' Friend.

This was remarkably directed well by virtual newcomer, Dean Israelite (Shorts). Considering this guy is so new to the director's chair, this was surprisingly helmed with painstakingly delineated pacing and realness. If the actors were more seasoned, I could possibly understand that the actors could've 'carried' this director, but considering these actors were not seasoned, this speaks volumes toward the quality of Israelite. It was written by Jason Harry Pagan and Andrew Deutschman, both of which have limited experience as well. Since Hollywood has produced so many films about time travel, I realize that coming up with another original script would be a monumental task, but, even though this wasn't expressly original, there was a certain innocence and freshness to it. Part of the reason might be that usually movies based on time travel involve adults, but since this deals with teenagers, it makes it more captivating. The one thing that this, and others cover, is the constant problem of not truly realizing what they have in their midst, and end up attempting to use the machine for personal means, which never works. Then they try to limit their personal use, but not totally use it for loftier reasons. Wrong! Once all these self-absorbed tactics are exhausted, then they realize that they must make things right. This is a very typical premise of just about any film based on a time travel concept. At one point, this was very similar to that of the film, "Groundhog Day". In fact, this film was mentioned in this as almost a homage.

Time travel movies are certainly intriguing, and this is no exception, but it would be in a positive direction to see a film of this type that could go in a totally different way. Then again, if these similar premises keep working, why fix it if it isn't broken?

Out of 4 Stars: 2.5                               Rated: PG-13                               106mins.