Admittedly I did enjoy this film, despite its tired and uninspired use of the found-footage gimmick and the teen vibe that saturates every scene in this film. It's not wildly inventive with how it tackles the sub-genre of time-travel, but there are a few glimmers of originality in an already derivative heavy lineage and visually some of the effects are pretty neat. More time-travel movies need to have that explosive mode of teleportation like you'd get in the Terminator films.
This would have been an entertaining movie if not for the horrible flashing, jolting and constant moving of the camera. Apparently we were supposed to believe that the filming of the movie was done by one of the actors. At times that almost seemed credible but at other times impossible - particularly when David goes back in time by himself.
All in all I wasn't disappointed in my choice to see this, but it's probably not something. The found- footage aspect is incredibly detracting as the camera is seemingly omnipotent throughout the film - despite its purpose being to 'record everything for scientific discovery' (implying someone ought to be filming). They really should have just stuck with traditional storytelling or at the very least limited the GoPro style filming to only the time journeys.
Take some advice from the movie Looper and don't get caught up in all the intricacies of time-travel or the obvious plot-holes in this film and you'll be fine. Otherwise you'll fry your brain wondering 'Why didn't they do ____' . Treat it as a bit of self-indulged fun and maybe have a beer or two and you'll get some entertainment out of this film. It has a low budget, a minuscule investment in things like character development or being a coherent narrative, and probably will fall into obscurity before long.
I feel that Project Almanac could have easily been the next Chronicle (my current favorite found footage film) had it taken advantage of the "second chance" method further. But once the trouble unfolds, the film takes a downward spiral as it becomes more of an action movie, rather then trying to go into the science detail that would have explained so much. As is, the film is more entertaining then I would have expected.
I'll give this five temporal displacement devices out of ten. What's interesting is that part that I should have found the most boring turns out to be the best part; the discovery of the machine. It's too bad that the rest of the story couldn't match up. Not a good found footage story, but not the worst either.
6.6/10·IMDb
38%·Rotten Tomatoes
47%·Metacritic
5/10 - Verdict
No comments:
Post a Comment