Projet Almanac

This film seems to have really divided people on here but on the whole I really liked it.

Teenager David Raskin (A very good Jonny Weston, an actor clearly with a good career ahead of him) is a bit of a brain box at school. His best friend is an even bigger nerd than he is and not as brainy and of course he fancies one of the it girls, while his sister is being bullied by some others. Weston is a very good looking actor, so trying to pass him off as a science geek is really a bit of a stretch one of the films weakest flaws but one I was prepared to forgive. This group form an unlikely alliance when they discover via one of David's deceased Dad's experiments, they have invented time travel. They jump together and change various things in their recent past and also do some fairly typical teenage things like go and win the lottery. Someone on here was moaning saying people wouldn't do that, they would go back and see people they loved and so on - well I am fairly certain as a teenager I would do both.

Our lead character though cannot leave well enough alone and jumps once too often and the ripple effect begins to cause them problems.

Project Almanac is a found footage film and these normally alone will cause me not to watch them but I found the premise of this one intriguing enough to seek it out. It's helped by a reasonably good script which plays out like a good episode of the Twilight Zone but what really helps the film is the cast. Its pretty rare that a group of teenage actors should all be universally so good, but that is certainly the case here. Sofia Black-D'Elia who more recently starred in Born of War is especially good and one I predict big things for while Sam Lerner who plays the thankless role of the Annoying friend clearly has taken on board everything his actor father taught him. This really is a talented group of individuals.

The film reminded me of the 1980s cult film The Explorers and I found myself rooting for the hero towards the end because you wanted him to set everything right. I really enjoyed this film and stayed up really late when I was super tired to watch it. Thankfully I wasn't bored and I was with them until the end. Recommended, from me at least anyway.

I liked Project Almanac. It didn't necessarily excite me. And I did scratch my head a few times. But ultimately, I liked it. It had an interesting, if slow moving, story. It stayed grounded, or at least tried to, and did it's very best to legitimize time travel as a possibility, even if it doesn't do a very good job of actually explaining the whole thing. Certainly some things are silly, like explaining being able to control the time machine with a cell phone as cell phones 'having enough power to put a rocket in space', but these don't really take away from a lot of the fun dealing with the time travel element.

The story is pretty simple, but actually feels heart felt. David, a genius level teenager newly accepted to MIT, finds himself short on the money to pay his tuition there. This inadvertently leads him to discover an unfinished time machine his absent father left hidden in his basement. While it takes a while for the time travel elements to ramp up, there is fun to be had in seeing these kids build, experiment, and ultimately successfully travel through time. The film does a good job in allowing us to escape certain illogical elements, like how a group of teens with a fairly limited budget could create a fully functioning time machine, much less create one when no one else on earth seemingly could. David and his buddy Adam are already established as being geniuses from the moment the film begins. So, it's not much of a leap that together they could figure out how to complete the already crafted instructions and blueprints sitting in front of them. You could even say there's legitimacy to the use of the found footage style they went for. They even comment on the use of the camera, which at least shows they recognize that it's there.

However, despite some explanation that helps solidify the camera's constant presence, the film , like so many found footage films, would have benefited from simply being shot like a typical narrative. The film even goes the lengths to, strangely enough, be somewhere in between. We see edits that don't make sense for someone whose recording and we have music play over things like a montage. It's just bizarre to see and hear these things play out over a film that is supposed to pretend to be found off camcorder footage. And these production elements aren't bad, they're just out of place and show the film could have benefited from simply eschewing the found footage style all together. There's also some head scratching moments throughout that can be eye-roll-inducing, but I tend to be able to suspend my disbelief, so it didn't bother me as much.

The film overall isn't one I'd probably tell people to run out and see. But I'd certainly tell them it's not a bad film. Far from it, it's a surprise in the sub genre of found footage. And while it doesn't reach the heights of Chronicle, which I consider to be the peak of found footage, I do think it's one of the better found footage films.

The teenager David Raskin (Jonny Weston) is a genius that dreams on joining the MIT. He has a crush on Jessie Pierce (Sofia Black-D'Elia) but he is too shy to date her. When David finds the design of a time machine that belonged to his father, he decides to build the device together with his friends Quinn Goldberg (Sam Lerner) and Adam Le (Allen Evangelista) and his sister Christina Raskin (Virginia Gardner). Soon Jessie joins the group and becomes David's girlfriend. When their experiment gets out of control and changing the future, David decides to fix the problems making them worse.

"Project Almanac" is a sort of "The Butterfly Effect 4", with a similar storyline with many paradoxes. Each time that the teenagers interfere with the past for personal profit, the future changes and the responsible David tries to fix it. Unfortunately the funny adventure is ruined by the awful camera work. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Projeto Almanaque" ("Project Almanac")

I just finished watching Project Almanac and if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to check it out. I was pleasantly surprised being that I had low hopes going in. it's another found footage movie, so if you are sick of them you might not enjoy it very much. Also if you're already not into time travel or science in general you might leave the theater with a bad taste in your mouth. I ended up enjoying it quite a bit and if I had to compare it to another movie I would say it has a strong feel of Project X and Chronical mixed together with the bases of it being more scientific then social(Project X) or supernatural(Chronical). You'll spend more time than usual feeling happy for the characters as they're having fun rather than the usual dose of drama every five minutes to keep people chewing their finger nails wondering what's going to happen next if Marie finds out Tony was talking to Marisa behind the bleaches and all that teen nonsense. it had a few mistakes but it's a movie so get over it. If I had to say one bad thing about it, I couldn't. I love science, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and for me it was an easy line drive down the middle of the plate knocked right out of the park. Personally I would give it a solid 8 out of 10 but if you're not a science buff you might be looking more at a 6-6.5 out of 10.

I'm not going to include any spoilers. I enjoyed the story and found the cast appealing. It was an interesting idea with some good special effects. There were a couple of plot holes but there were also some funny nods to movies such as Back to the Future which I enjoyed. You remember the scene where Doc Brown is trying to get two electric cables to connect?

It reminded me a lot of the superb low-budget 'Primer' which covers some of the same ground. In that movie, some geekie guys accidentally discover time-travel and have to decide what to do with it. Also, Almanac had some good jokes, which many movies seem to leave out.

Seriously, did you see any jokes in Man of Steel? Sadly the shocking camera work ruined the whole experience.All the jumping about, whirling, juddering and flicking etc. It just made me feel ill.