Benvenuti a ieri

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.

And this is true of both the characters in the movie and the viewer. Well the latter should rather try to enjoy as much as possible. Because the science behind it all does not really mix well together. A problem that the movie is not alone with. Mingling with time and trying to make it plausible is almost impossible. Just a few have managed to get the "technical" things right or rather the things right that would seem logical.

But throw logic out of the window, because this is about teenagers. And while you get the obvious "what would you change, if you could" discussion, in the end it all boils down to personal advantage (mostly). And can you blame them? The twist at the end is kind of redundant, but it's there and better than the alternate endings that can be watched on the disc/special features. Enjoyable if you don't think too much

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.

David Raskin (Jonny Weston) applies to MIT with the help of his friends Quinn Goldberg (Sam Lerner), Adam Le (Allen Evangelista), and his sister Christina Raskin (Virginia Gardner). He could only get a small partial scholarship and his mother is looking to sell their home to raise tuition money. While looking for his late father's experiments in the attic, David finds an old video of his 7th birthday but it has his older self in the video. He and his friends find parts of a time travel machine hidden in his basement. They reconstruct it and travel back in time with his crush Jessie Pierce (Sofia Black-D'Elia).

This uses the found footage idea and the shaky cam moves get tiresome. It adds nothing and has no real internal logic. The kids are all excited and hyper. Obviously, it's intended to inject energy into the movie. That also gets tiresome. The big turning point is Lollapalooza which only adds to the superficiality of the whole enterprise. The premise starts out well but the movie is a long slow downward slide. Its initial potential slowly fades away.

Project Almanac is a sci-fi found footage film about.... no, not horror.... time travel. I thought it was an interesting way to show a time travel film and really made sense when you were watching it, as to why they would be filming, so it helped to know why they always had a camera out. Overall i would have to say that this was a pretty fun film and doesn't go too over the top with the confusing back and forth through time stuff that other time travel films do. It is pretty easy to understand for a general audience and that helps to have more people follow the plot but can make it a little more predictable. I didn't feel that this was all that predictable though, there were quite a few moments that i could not have guessed and some others that were foreshadowed a little too much. So in terms of the plot it was very coherent for 96% of the film and i have to say was also interesting, just the last 2 minutes of the film for me got unnecessarily complex and ruined the fun adventure the rest of the film felt like.

Also, while this was a found footage film there were many times throughout the film where i was able to forget about that. The shaky cam and awkward camera angles that do bother me in other found footage films didn't have the same effect in this film. Some of the ways that sections are shot with a mounted camera or in an environment that would be shot with a moving camera in a regular film helped to take my mind off the fact that this was just another found footage film. So to make it a found footage film but have elements of just a regularly shot sci-fi film i thought really elevated the film.

In terms of the characters i thought they were all very well written, sometimes a little over exaggerated in terms of their emotions but as a group i thought they worked pretty well. I also have no idea who these actors were but they were all pretty good, no standouts but they were all good to watch. Unfortunately where this film let me down a little was the first section of the film before all of the funky time travel stuff begins, it was just a little too slow and i would have liked for them to just cut to the chase and get to the time travelling without the setup that didn't really add anything to the film except for a few minor plot points later in the film. In the end this sci-fi time travel film does a good job at creating a fun and easily understandable story with pretty good characters. But is let down by a fairly unnecessary first section and a very unnecessarily confusing ending. - 7.3