I found myself with a few hours to spare last Wednesday and thought, hey, why not watch a movie?  I originally wanted to see The Imitation Game because, hello, Bennedict Cumberbatch.  Unfortunately by the time I was done with an important errand, the movie was already half-way through.  I love my Bennedict Cumberbatch and all, but I wouldn’t wait for the next show.  So, it was either this or Halik Sa Hangin. Here’s the round-up of Dean Israelite’s Project Almanac.

Please note that there may be spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

THE STORY:

The movie opens with David Raskin (Jonny Weston – Taken 3) and his two nerd friends, Quinn Goldberg (Sam Lerner – Suburgatory) and Adam Le (Allen Evangelista – The Secret Life of the American Teenager) making an application video for a scholarship to MIT.  It is clear that they are all brilliant high school students, and more than a few referrences of Doctor Who were thrown in to prove this.  David is successful in getting a partial scholarship to MIT but it’s not enough and he can’t afford the tuition.  Upon the advice of his Science teacher, he digs through his late father’s (who was also a scientist) equipment in the attic, in the hopes of finding something interesting that he can use for his application to another college.  He and his sister Christina (Virginia Gardner – Glee) find an old video recorder with a tape of David’s seventh birthday – the last day they saw their Dad Ben (Gary Weeks – The Walking Dead) alive.  Fondly they watch the tape back, until they notice something weird: seventeen year-old David was recorded to have been in the party. With the help of Adam and Quinn, David unravels the thread to his father’s past that leads him to the blueprint of a time machine.

THE GOOD:

1. Virginia Gardner is super pretty!  It makes the whole premise of her being bullied totally unbelievable though, because with looks like that, why would she choose to hang out with his older brother and his nerdy pack of friends?
   
2. The whole time travelling process looked pretty cool.  Although that’s probably because Michael Bay produced this movie more than anything else though.
   
3. That they used their time travelling powers for teenaged stuff.  Because yes, that is totally what I would use it for too – to redo my chemistry finals and to attend a rave music festival.
   
4. Jonny Weston was sympathetic enough as a leading man.  At least I felt the character’s frustration of not being able to close the deal with the girl of his dreams.
   

THE BAD:

1. The cheesy dad plot arc.  Blech.  I’d have preferred it if they just found the blueprints at an abandoned warehouse or something.  The whole emotional thing just ended up being forced.
2. The total lack of science.  I wasn’t expecting them to break down the computation that made time travel possible, but to zoom by the data using montages was pretty uncool.  Especially after throwing in the Doctor Who gags, I was expecting that the film makers at least did some research on the concept.

   

3. Things escalated pretty quickly.  I probably wouldn’t have minded had the film makers taken the time to explain the whole ripple effect, exactly how their jumps back in time affected the new timeline, but as it was things just went from bad to worse with no real logic behind them.  Again, they just zoomed by the science.

THE UGLY:

1. That ending.  Pffffft.  That it even tried to end it in any sort of “cool” way was just pathetic.  It didn’t even make any sense!
2. The trailer made it seem like it’d be something like Chronicle.  The two movies have nothing in common, aside from the found footage style of filming.
3. It didn’t feel like a movie, not really.  More like a bad episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark.

All in all Project Almanac was a pretty sucky movie.  Performances were okay, for the most part, and the actors made so with what they were given.  With the advent of movies like Interstellar, it’s unexcusable to put out a sci-fi film these days without researching the science.  This almost feels like an insult.

THE VERDICT: 4.5/10

*All photos are lifted from the film’s IMDB page.