Project Almanac

This is why we need to bring back Star Trek. If you ever watched the show, you would know you can’t go messing around with the past! It’s, like, the second or third directive!

Jonny “Can I buy an H to spell my name correctly” Weston stars as David - a super smart kid who wants to get into MIT. He struggles with the devastating, untimely death of his father, and mom’s financial difficulties, but our hero does get accepted in to the school. However, David doesn't secure enough scholarship money to cover the costs.

Seeking some amazing experiment or project that will win him a full ride, David and his sister, Christina (Virginia Gardner), dig around Dad’s old lab and find a possible time machine (they are so lucky Dad used to work for a secretive government contractor or something).

Because this is a movie about teenagers for teenagers, David, Christina and their pals, Adam (Allen Evangelista) and Quinn (Sam Lerner), make it work using stuff found around the house and stolen from school (you won’t look at your PS4 the same way again).

The gang, along with the prettiest gal in school, Jessie (Sofia Black-D’Elia), start jumping through time to do fun stuff like winning the lottery and attending music festivals with VIP passes, but soon realize they are impacting more than their own lives.

Can they go back in time and put their reality back on the path they once knew?

Project Almanac starts off fine, but the creative team struggles to find a satisfying, logical ending.

Director Dean Israelite and writers Andrew Deutschman and Jason Pagan present a fun, adventurous movie with a kooky comical tone to it. It’s all about goofy teenagers living out wish fulfillment in the way teenagers would.

However, the team has no clue where it is going. Israelite and company take far too long to get to the drama. They might as well have stayed with a comical movie where the kids are laughing it up as they play pranks on themselves and exact revenge on those who wronged them. That’s entertaining and best suits the one dimensional characters presented here.

Yet, Project Almanac gets bogged down by inserting drama about the damage done as these kids gallivant all over the time space continuum. David spirals out of control with no real plan to right those wrongs, and even the audience is left confused about what is real and what needs to be fixed.

Worst of all, the ending is a mess and needs better writing as we hit a poignant moment that could have meant the world if scripted better with appropriate, emotional dialogue for the characters. It’s a moment for growth for David that could have helped him evolve beyond being a kid obsessed with teen obsessions, but it is lost to make way for a forced happy ending because they learn nothing from what just happened.

Project Almanac is rated PG-13 for some language and sexual content.