Theatrical Reviews: Project Almanac

Time travel is a tough cinematic subject to beat.  I’ve seen plenty of time-travel films, and I’ve liked more of them then not.  Even the time-travel movies I don’t like, still held my attention for the majority of their runtime, and that’s more then I can say for some other more critically acclaimed sub genres.

Project Almanac, the latest entry into the family of flicks, is sadly not one of the many time-travel movies that I like; but it’s not exactly a waste of film either.  The movie does a couple of interesting things, but its characters are too boring and there are way too many stupid plot elements for it to rise above the ranking of “meh.”

Found footage films and time travel films have problems that run through the majority of their respective filmographies.  Found footage movies have the burden of trying to find believable reasons for the characters in it to film every important plot element and character reaction, and time travel movies have to try to plow through the fact that, most of the time, cinematic time travel makes no freaking sense.  The filmmakers that developed Project Almanac made the unfortunate decision to take both of these movie-types on at the same time, while adamantly refusing to invent anyway to make either of the admittedly silly genres cohesive. 

The film is naratively comparative to 21 and Over, Primer and Chronicle; but isn’t as entertaining as any of those movies.  This is partially because the movies plot isn’t interesting; but I put a lot of the blame on the central characters themselves which are all fairly one-dimensional and uninspiredly concocted by each of their actors.  21 and Over may have been a boring movie for stupid young people, but at least that movie had Miles Teller.  Project Almanac has no such force of character, and seriously suffers because of it.

Honestly there isn’t that much to analyze about the film as a whole.  It’s not unpleasant to watch, in-fact it’s relatively entertaining.  It’s just kind of uninteresting, not wholesale boring, but still uninteresting.  The movie is too long for its plot, its cinematography is obnoxious and it spends too much time focusing on a romance between two characters that nobody will ever care about.  I criticize it for poor use of found-footage and time-travel tropes, but, to be fair, without those elements the movie would be completely worthless.