Time Month - Mini Review: Project Almanac

Now here’s a name that’s narrowly been escaping my radar these past few years, Michael Bay.

Yeah, if you’re a fan of Transformers or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles you’ve most likely heard of him. Not necessarily favourably either as a lot of problems keep repeating. In all honestly, I’ve never watched Transformers or the Ninja Turtles movies, I was a little young when this lot came out so it holds no nostalgic value for me. But I’m fully aware of problems people have with Bay movies, over-focus on side-characters, incomprehensible fight scenes, over-use of explosions and of course, the way he portrays female characters. Not to mention egregious product placement

But what about away from the nostalgic action films. Well, he did Pearl Harbour. Honestly it does say something when Transformer’s has best Rotten Tomatoes score of anything he’s directed since the 1996. But we’re not looking at something he directed, he only produced this movie but much like with the Ninja Turtles movies, you can see his influence none the less.

So, for this last instalment of Time Month

This is Project Almanac

High schooler David Raskin is admitted to MIT but fails to win the scholarship that would pay for his fees. With his mother wanting to sell the house to pay for them, David searches his father’s old junk for one last chance and what he finds will change his world.

OK, let’s start with the Bay-isms very much present in this movie. Product Placement – a Toyota Hybrid became a necessary piece of finding the experiment, a Toyota Corolla is mentioned (though not shown) in a later scene and a slow-mo shot of Red Bull. It’s not much compared to the masses of it in a Transformers movie but this movie was made on a $12m budget, it didn’t need a lot of product placement to make its money back. There also is a weird portrayal of women in this. The two female leads do not interact with each other. One exists almost purely as a romantic interest and the other has a bullying issue introduced out of no-where and resolved just as quickly. Oh, and she takes her top off in one scene. Classy!

Time travel has limitless possibilities, that’s why I decided to do this theme month. You can have secret agents wanting to change their relationship status to a transsexual person being the mother and father of herself and using time travel to position yourself inside a painting. This movie is relatively small in scope in comparison to some of the movies I’ve covered in this one, but that doesn’t make the situation less intriguing. Or at least, it doesn’t to me

The cast are largely young adults and to start with they do use their ability to time travel for selfish reasons. To get revenge, to get rich and, of course, to pursue romance. And I’ll give the movie this, there is enough there for me to establish something of a connection to the characters to understand their motivations and I think that’s down to the banter they share. I’m not saying the dialogue is Oscar-worthy or anything but it’s fit for purpose.

But I suppose we need to address the elephant in the room. It’s a found footage movie. If you saw my review of Sleep No More you’d know I’m no fan of found footage, or really the horror genre in general but I have more fundamental problems with its use here. I

There’s a scene where they’re robbing a school (our heroes) of hydrogen, why are they filming that? Also, none of the extras or minor characters react to the fact that there are people filming everything that they do. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s found footage is quintessential to the plot and particularly the ending, one of the better parts of the movie.

My overall opinion is this movie is okay, which, given what 2035 was, makes me glad to have at least mediocre to end on

Rating 50/100