Reloading: Project Almanac (Spoilers)

By the time this review is released, I’m willing to bet the film has been removed from most theaters in an effort to make as much room for the 50 Shades of Grey craze that is all but inevitable. That being said, I wouldn’t do a delayed-review of Project Almanac if I didn’t think it worth discussion. It’s not a spectacular film and it won’t do anything to rock your world. But it was actually entertaining and is one of the few “found footage” films that I can say does a good job with the concept without becoming a nauseating mess. So, yeah. Rather than talk about 50 Shades, let’s talk about Project Almanac.

Project Almanac follows the adventure of David Raskin, a young genius on his way to college, looking for something he can do to earn a scholarship to keep his mother from selling their house so they can afford his trip to MIT. During his search, he finds a discarded camera from his father which shows unique footage of the current David Raskin (age 18) briefly at his 7^th Birthday Party. If that sentence didn’t make it clear, I’m trying to say David time traveled to when he was 7 but we have yet to figure out how.

More exploring and investigating puts David into his father’s workshop where he finds parts for an object called “Project Almanac” (roll credits). While he isn’t sure what it is at first, the instructions have enough jargon to insinuate that it has something to do with time travel so that any Sci-Fi nerd can figure that part out. The hard part, however, is getting it put together and powered up enough to function. In a manner similar to Iron Man, David and his friends throw together multiple attempts and experiments to get the device working. Each attempt requiring more power and preparation until they eventually succeed.

Finally they begin time travelling on their own. And the film comes with all kinds of awesome time travel rules you’d expect. If there’s a time paradox (where you see yourself from the future) things go bad and both versions of yourself will freeze up, glitch out, and disappear from existence. If you change something too much, a ripple effect will also take place that can distort the time stream enough where things get progressively worse (think FlashPoint Paradox, but in a smaller scale). But the film plays with that rule a bit better than FlashPoint which gets way too extreme for the actions of one character isolated in a single event.

Here, it’s more of a punishment for a rule being broken. The gang has an agreement to only travel through time as a group and never alone. David, however, breaks this rule in a selfish act of satisfying his boner which causes the initial breakdown of the time stream. When he goes back to try and fix that, his best friend ends up in the hospital, almost dead. When he tries to fix that, well, then a paradox occurs that forces him to undo everything that’s happened in order to restore order to the lives of he and his friends. In short, it takes the cop-out Sonic 2006 ending approach where none of the events technically ever happen. But, unlike Sonic 2006, the events of Project Almanac were recorded by cameras, allowing David and his sister to once again find this information at the end of the film.

But there are problems with how that works. First, while I get the gang has a go-pro with them most of the time and cell-phones with cameras, the fact there are so many different camera options makes it hard to know exactly who is filming what with what, when or where. During the scene when the gang goes to a music festival for nine hours, I had to wonder who was holding the camera when they were busy partying. Or why David and Jen were being recorded? I mean, I guess the friends don’t need to respect privacy, but you do come off like an asshole if you’re constantly watching your buddy trying to make out with a hot girl and not give them space.

But there’s an ending scene in which it’s just David and basically a whole different character. There’s no camera anywhere that would make sense and I have to wonder just where on Earth it is and how this footage is being recorded. In fact, the scene where David is racing to get hydrogen for the last time-jump before the end of the film has that same problem as the bulk of it is in third person, but from an angle he can’t possibly film. Yet, somehow, a camera is following him and it’s unclear as to how. That being said, at this point, you’re kind of absorbed in the action that it doesn’t really detract from the scene. But it’s a question I raise after the fact and it makes me consider the whole found-footage aspect of this film.

To me, such an aspect is wholly unnecessary. This film probably would have functioned fine without the found footage concept. The only reason it’s there to tie everything together (other than because it was cheaper to film that way than using actual cameras) was because that’s how they discover the footage of David being in the past in the first place. If not for that, the entire crux of this film would be lost. Granted, they could have changed up framing a bit to make it work, but ultimately the found-footage concept is a double edged sword for this film, but not in the way that it hurts other films.

In most other films, the concept breaks the film by simply just being bad camera work, making it impossible to tell what’s going on. In Project Almanac, the camera is fairly solid save for a few brief moments here and there. The concept only crumbles a bit during those “who’s holding the camera” moments and those are, as I said, more of an issue in the latter half of the film when I suspect the director forgot this was a found footage film and had to quickly remind us at the very end with a lost minute plot-reveal-surprise-twist. And you know what? Fine, the film is still conceptually interesting enough for me to overlook that now. But this director better straighten up if they ever hope to make bigger budget projects because that kind of forgetful attitude wouldn’t fly for bigger projects like the Marvel films or Jurassic Park. I’ll tell you that right now.

All that being said, there aren’t a lot of interesting films out at the moment. I mean, I guess if it’s really that important to you, you can re-watch American Sniper. But you didn’t listen to me when I recommended you do that for Guardians of the Galaxy and actually meant it, so whatever. For me, the fact a movie actually tackles the concept of time travel is fascinating and it’s something we haven’t seen done in quite a while, I think since the 80s. I mean, it’s a concept you can only go so far with before the plots start becoming all-too-similar. But still worth seeing every now and again.

While Project Almanac isn’t perfect, it’s certainly the best in one of the worst genre of film, found-footage-films, and that’s got to count for something. So, yes, it gets a passing grade and a fair recommendation because it actually managed to make time travel interesting and provide us with characters that are more or less fun to follow into the not-too-distant-past. Thanks for reading and tune in again next week for more Reloading Reviews.

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