While I rarely care for it, I can understand why a horror film would use the “found footage” conceit to ramp up the believability of its scares. And I can see why a film like Chronicle (2012) would use the same approach to say something (even flimsily) about our constant documentation of our lives. But, like much of the found footage films that come out, I cannot understand — from any practical standpoint — why Dean Israelite’s Project Almanac adopts the approach besides the obvious and lazy idea of ripping off Chronicle and making very teen-centric sci-fi. Beyond this, the format lends nothing to the film, the characters or the story except being a constant, confusing distraction.
Maybe this is for the best, since Project Almanac is a nonsensical, directionless and incredibly uneventful time travel flick. The film’s reminiscent of Jeffrey Combs toward his nemesis in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985), “You steal the secret of life and death, and here you are trysting with a bubble-headed coed.” In Project Almanac, a small squad of teens steals the secret to time travel and uses it to see the band Vampire Weekend. If anything, the film’s a treatise on why randy, short-sighted teenagers shouldn’t be allowed out of the house, let alone wafting through the past.
The film’s premise revolves around David (Jonny Weston, Chasing Mavericks), a genius high school kid who gets accepted to MIT but doesn’t get enough scholarship money to attend, forcing his mother (Amy Landecker, Enough Said) to sell their house to pay his tuition. David just getting deep into student loan debt like the rest of America would make the film nonexistent. Instead, while looking for a solution to the family’s financial woes, he stumbles upon plans for a time machine that his deceased father (Gary Weeks, The Spectacular Now) left in the basement. With the help of his friends (Sam Lerner and TV actor Allen Evangelista), David builds the machine, and they — along with David’s crush Jessie (Sofia Black-D’Elia, The Immigrant) — start traveling through time in small increments, eventually doing little more than partying, retaking chemistry tests and rigging the lottery.
But, things soon get out of hand as time is fiddled with and disastrous happenings begin, with the main tension being between David’s need to fix these problems while maintaining his budding relationship with Jessie, which only exists because of his own time-travel shenanigans. It’s obviously all very convoluted, but I’m far from convinced that the movie even understands what’s happening. Granted, time travel movies are by nature tangled and complex, but they at least need to work within their own set rules. Project Almanac has none of that, instead it just piles up complications and contrivances with little in the way of internal or external explanation. Combine all of this with the found footage aspect (which it obviously cheats on constantly) and it makes for a movie that’s vapid and confusing on multiple levels. Rated PG-13 for some language and sexual content.
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