The feature directorial debut of Dean Israelite, "Project Almanac" is a time-travel drama where the characters are savvy enough to be intimately familiar with "Looper," "Groundhog Dog" and "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," but too stupid to realize that going back in time themselves is about to create a horrifying paradox. Even when things start going haywire and the lead character, 17-year-old science whiz David Raskin (Jonny Weston), keys into this fact, he continues to be so self-involved that it takes him an irritatingly long time before he tries to do anything about it. Not holding up to a moment of scrutiny, the screenplay by Andrew Stark and David Pagan unravels while still playing out. It doesn't help that the film is told in the increasingly tired found-footage mold, the kind that is too slickly edited, too unnaturally written, and used in too convoluted a fashion to buy for a second.
When David is accepted for a physics fellowship at MIT, he is over the moon until he realizes he will only be getting $5,000 in financial aid—a far cry from the $45,000 he needs in order to go there. As his widowed mother, Kathy (Amy Landecker), prepares to sell their home to make sure he gets to college, David and slightly younger sister Christina (Ginny Gardner) stumble upon a camcorder in their attic that belonged to their late father. The home movie on it is of David's seventh birthday party—the final time they saw their dad before he perished in a car accident—but their bittersweet visiting of this footage is cut short when they spot something unimaginable: in the background of one of the shots, the grown version of David can be seen passing through, a spectator to his own childhood celebration. Further research into this anomaly leads David and his friends, Quinn (Sam Lerner) and Adam (Allen Evangelista), to another discovery in the basement: a hidden device and blueprints for what looks to be a time machine. With David's dream girl, Jessie Pierce (Sofia Black-D'Elia), soon joining in, the five classmates begin testing out time travel, going back to pass a failed test, give comeuppance to a bully, and win the lottery. The more they flirt with the space-time continuum, however, the more their present-day existence and the world at large start to alter. The changes are initially small but quickly escalate, a butterfly effect that David is not sure he wants to correct if it means losing Jessie as his new girlfriend.
See Dustin Putman, TheFilmFile.com. for full review
