Cast: If you recognized anyone in this other than Amy Landecker, good on you. I doubt this will be like Cloverfield where most of the cast (Lizzie Caplan, Odette Annable, TJ Miller, Jessica Lucas) starts showing up other places, although I wouldn't mind being wrong about that. For the movie, they were pretty good. Jonny Weston looks incredibly familiar. Sofia Black-D'Elia is good as the object of Weston's affection. Sam Lerner is fine for comedic effect. Allen Evangelista is a good sounding board and accomplice. Virginia Gardner also looks super familiar but spends too much time behind the camera.
Plot: David (Weston) is a super smart high schooler applying to MIT, which is how we know he's super smart. His sister, Christina (Gardner) likes to record everything because this is a found footage film, which requires a person like that. Quinn and Adam (Lerner and Evangelista) are David's best friends. Jessie (Black-D'Elia) is the cool girl in school who, of course, chances her way into this because we need a love interest. Well, David discovers his dead dad's old plans for what turns out to be a time machine. He gets it working and, well, you've seen a time travel movie before, so you know the rest. It's an interesting idea, but there's a lot of holes in the cause and effect with the time travel. There's also a lot of characters acting in really profoundly stupid ways that I have a hard time even believing teenagers would. You do pretty much get what you expect from this. Parties, winning the lottery, second chances. It's all there.
Elephant in the Room: Did it need to be found footage? I absolutely love found footage when it's done well. Cloverfield is perfect for that format. Paranormal Activity is really good too. It's one of my favorite things about the V/H/S movies. Quite frankly, it works best for horror movie because a lack of information can help add scares. It is a structure that you have to commit to. This isn't as bad as Project X which basically dropped the idea as soon as it got hard. This does have a bit too much perfect editing and timing and way too much sound recording that could only exist on a sound stage (Seriously, there is no way you get sound that clear in the middle of Lollapalooza). Part of me would really like to have seen the standard shot version of this, because it is an interesting enough idea on its own.
To Sum Things Up:
This movie hits some pretty significant sweet spots for me. I like how found footage style normally doesn't spoon feed all the information to you. Project Almanac kind of does though. I like movies about wish fulfillment and second chances. This does a pretty good job of that. I like seeing a lot of young, pretty people on the screen. This has a lot of that, to the degree that even I could've used some subtlety. Ultimately, the movie spends a little too much time setting up the time travel and doesn't get all that deep into the chaotic butterfly effect that I expected [from the trailer]. There's a few too many gaps in logic to forgive. I did enjoy it. The cast is solid and when the movie works, it's a lot of fun. The messiness just got in the way too much.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment