Project Almanac
Dean Israelite directs a refreshingly different found footage movie. While he must push through the regular tropes of the genre, he does so quickly, and with every cast main member eventually wearing a GoPro, he can justify just any camera angle, high quality shots and the audience is not stuck in one frame. What makes this movie work is that the characters are believable. They succeed in a believable fashion, everything progressing in logical stages. The director avoids the slew of lucky co-incidences to keep the story going, characters shrugging off near-fatal wounds and the inevitable cast turning on each other. The ending is more satisfying than I expected but I still wanted a little more.
[Minor Spoiler Warning]
David, Jessie, Quinn, Adam and Kathy are typical high school students that might have been plucked straight out of the Archie comics until they get their hands on time travel. They do pretty much what any normal person would do, and set out fixing the minor problems with their lives and then win the lottery. It's slow and it takes a long time but the ramifications of what they are doing start rolling in and their problems escalate quickly. Respecting the audience enough not to spoon feed them, Israelite includes classical scenes where the police are arriving but does not waste time explaining why or how they knew to be there. In a movie this complicated, it simply wouldn't matter anyway.
A combination of nerds vs. jocks movie, guy gets the girl, found footage, party movie and time travel, this movie deserves an Oscar for simply avoiding the pages to cliché's and pit falls common to each of these genres. Just some examples, in order; No one grabs a main cast member by the shirt and shoves them up against a locker. The girl isn't oblivious to her love interest and only interested in the quarterback. No one is addicted to filming everything because they are afraid of the "real" world. No one throws up on someone. And time travel I'll get back to.
If you can tolerate a little shaky cam action, this movie is a must see, and even that vanishes for long periods. The cast just seems so human that it's hard to remember that these people are acting. No one does anything that is clearly just to advance the plot, while at the same time the tension builds and builds as things drift slowly and then finally spiral completely out of control before the final. It reaches a point where you want to demand the other shoe drop and you realize that you've been watching them undo the laces the whole time.
[Complete Spoiler Warning]
I can not talk about the time travel in this movie without ruining the ending. Please consider yourself warned!
Project Almanac does something unusual. It reveals early on that the past can be altered without incredibly negative consequences. The characters meet themselves and one draws on the back of the neck of his sleeping self and it appears on his own neck at the same time. The time space continuum is not destroyed and the world does not end. Even as things get worse and worse, the net impact of their travels are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things cumulating in a plane crash. That's it. One plane crashed. And you know what? The main characters feel guilty, as they should.
THE RULES
The movie establishes ground rules and sticks with them throughout, which is fantastic; Time can be re-written. The results of these changes are instantaneous, regardless of when you are. If you caused the changes, you keep your old memories. Changing history has a ripple effect which can cause other events to change in unpredictable ways. These are very logical rules. We are even given little hints about the ripple effect as early as the first time travel!
I would label this Instantaneous Flexible Paradox Time and include a note about the memory retention. (I wrote a book about time travel: Chronomancer: Time Travel for Everyone. http://www.rpgnow.com/product/58717/Chronomancer-Time-Travel-for-Everyone. It's a roleplaying manual but represents 7 years of thought about time travel.)
These rules are great, unfortunately they break them. They mixed Determinism and Free Will. Either going back in time can't change the present because that's what always happened (Determinism) or going back in time can change the present (Free Will).
FREE WILL AND DETERMISM
With Free Will you can't see the results of something you have not done yet. The main characters can not see the results of anything they do later in the movie, with one glaring exception. The whole plot is predicated on David Raskin seeing his adult self in the background of a birthday video of his child self. I find this discrepancy annoying but out of respect for a real descent movie, let's try justify this using the set of rules they spend the rest of the movie establishing: You can't see the results of something you haven't done yet.
Fortunately the end of the movie provides an easy solution. They created a loop. The most famous loop is the infinite loop caused by going back and killing your parents (you are never born so you don't go back and kill them so they are alive so you do go back and kill them - and repeat). Loops don't have to be infinite though. This movie shows several loops where they try something several times until they succeed and then stop. This is another thing that keeps the movie down-to-Earth and realistic and it's setting up the solution to it's own problem. I hope that is deliberate. At this point the movie you watched is the first loop, and we see the beginning of the second loop start at the end.
At the beginning of the movie, David Raskin finds a Camcorder with footage of his childhood birthday on it including his adult self in the background. At the end of the movie David Raskin goes back in time to that birthday party as an adult, gets filmed, and destroys his father's time machine. This creates a plot-happy paradox. David is erased and vanishes, but his Camcorder is magically left behind. We jump back to the start of the movie and see David find TWO Camcorders instead of one. One has the movie we just watched on it, presumably. Now armed with foreknowledge of everything he is about to do, the movie ends at the start, implying that he's going to try time travel again.
This creates an interesting situation. David is both the main character, and the audience.
So what about the first video and the fact you can't see something you haven't done yet? The solution is that, at the beginning of the movie, David has already done this all before. The movie is actually his SECOND try at time travel which ends with him erasing himself and all the time travel he did. We don't need to see the third attempt and can just assume that he is successful at winning Jessie Pierce's heart with the massive amount of foreknowledge the videos give him. We will quietly ignore the fact he should not have the GoPro footage unless, since he is a genius, he upgraded the chips in the Camcorder and copied all the footage over. At this point the movie is three loops, one before, the movie, and the one that will happen after.
FOUR LOOPS?
There is a clue that suggests two loops previous to the movie. When the Camcorder is picked up, the director pointedly zooms in on it. I strongly suspect the Camcorder was made after the time period in which is was used. I suspect David brought the camcorder back in an earlier loop. That means he looped once to bring the camcorder back, then a second time to get shot by that camcorder. However this is predicated on the camcorder being in the wrong year.
LOOPER AND OTHER HOMAGE'S
The movie makes an homage to Looper which has a similar plot. Used a few minutes before the time travel starts this will help anyone who has seen Looper understand what is about to happen. I would have loved a reference to Back to the Future, but more and more people will not have seen it and it was considerably more complicated. The Doctor Who reference is also appreciated but it's so casual you can almost see the lawyers waving their fingers. I actually missed the Ground Hog Day reference when he un-fails the chemistry test "I'm going to Groundhog this", which again was to help explain looping.
REPLACEMENT TIME TRAVEL
This is perhaps the weakest part of the movie but only because it isn't explained. If you go back to the same time and place, you can replace yourself as if you had never done a trip and try again. The movie does feel like some scenes are missing and perhaps the explanation is on the cutting room floor somewhere. But there is a very logical explanation. If you think in Star Trek terms of beaming or teleporting, it makes sense that you could divert an old beam with a new one, cancelling the old one out. Perhaps it's best that Israelite didn't burden his movie trying to explain that without a Vulcan. The beaming analogy also explains why they were replacing their previous younger selves - they didn't want to. The replacement was deliberate and only worked when they wanted it to - handy.
TECHNOLOGY
I really enjoyed the short discussion about the fact that an IPhone could power the space shuttle and had no trouble running the time machine. This is true. The space shuttle had a computer on board with the power of a 386 computer and the lunar missions had far less than that to work with. A 386 typically had 2 MB of ram memory and an IPhone 5 has 1 GB of ram memory (1000 MB).
Mark Charke
Writing that Makes you Think
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