So I saw Project Almanac, and I felt déjà vu even before
the kids started travelling through time. This movie is basically either a
remake or a sequel to the 2012 movie Chronicle.
Both are found-footage movies about groups of teenagers that gain genre-movie
powers and have a really great time until the other shoe drops and everything
goes bad. In Chronicle the kids got
super powers, in Project Almanac they can travel through time (also there are
two female team member to go along with the core three guys).
I was pleasantly surprised by a few parts of the movie. I
found the characters to be fun and funny, with pretty good chemistry and
ability to play off each other. To me they actually felt like actual friends
doing stuff, instead of just reciting lines. I also liked how they do a bunch
of time travel stuff that’s fun and seems like things smart kids would try to
do if they could actually go back in time, they’ve actually seen a bunch of
time travel movies and have an idea of what the obvious pitfalls are, so they
don’t even try to get into it. It’s light and amusing, not crazy Primer stuff. It was also pretty surprising
how long it takes before the other shoe to drop, things don’t get particularly
menacing until the very end of the movie.
On the other hand, be aware that this is one of those
found footage movies. The camera is shaky, and the explanations for why a
character has a camera on and recording at any given moment can be tenuous at
best, though it is generally clear who is filming at any time and where the
camera is. It’s also a time travel movie, so some plot holes do appear towards
the end, though they didn’t slow me down that much personally. Also, for a
movie with a main cast of five people, several characters felt extremely underdeveloped,
and there’s a fair amount of telling instead of showing in some parts. Finally, at the end of the movie they have to go back to the distant past, 10 years ago, and being reminded that that's 2004-a time that I was an actual grown up person during-is pretty terrible. Stop being young you rotten kids!
Project Almanac is a fun time travel adventure with a
decent cast, despite the motion-sickness you might get from the camera work and
some weaknesses in the script. Not a masterpiece, but a perfectly agreeable
movie.
What found footage film has character development?
ReplyDeleteWhile I can't speak about the genre as a whole, there were characters and plots in the movie that are pretty under served. The biggest example is the main character's sister. She's the one that's actually doing most of the filming of the movie, but her subplot-that she's being bullied in high school, mostly happens off screen and is only vaguely referred to. More importantly, there's no explanation for why she's filming everything before all the time travel stuff starts, It made the movie feel incomplete to me, like they had to cut out important chunks to come in at a 100 minute run-time.
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