Project Almanac (2015)

Project Almanac arrives as a found-footage time-travel lark, a group of teenagers building a machine in a basement and discovering that causality has a sense of humor. The film moves briskly through its premise and treats the mechanics of paradox with the seriousness of a science fair project. It is a modest enterprise, and its cultural footprint is correspondingly light.

The ensemble is diverse in the ordinary way that modern casting often is: a Vietnamese-American friend, a female lead, a sister who exists mostly to react. These characters participate in the plot without speeches about identity, which keeps the film from tipping into sermonizing. The only economic anxiety on display is David's inability to afford MIT and the family house going on the market. That is a personal financial problem, not a systemic indictment. The film has no interest in climate, body politics, neurodivergence, or historical revision. Its LGBT content is nonexistent. Its feminist content is a love interest and a sister, neither of whom drives the story. The film's lecture energy is near zero, which is a small mercy in an era of movies that pause the plot to inform the audience of its virtues.

The result is a time-travel thriller that wants to be Chronicle and settles for a lottery ticket and a trip to Lollapalooza. The found-footage camerawork remains as irritating as the critical consensus suggested, and the premise is underused. But as a cultural artifact, the film is nearly inert. It has enough casting diversity to avoid looking sealed off, and little else in the way of progressive signaling. We are left with a movie about changing the past that has no apparent desire to change the present.