Project Almanac

RATING: F

The found-footage genre is probably one of the worst things ever to happen to cinema. Sure, it might work good for horror movies, especially considering that the cliches of those two things go well together, but put it with pretty much anything else and it's a hot mess. Chronicle and Cloverfield were decent for found-footage movies, but even they suffered from the fact that they were found-footage movies.

There are a lot of problems with found-footage movies, especially when you try to combine them with non-horror movies. The characters are pretty much always stupid and flat, the script tries to match up with real life but instead comes out horrifying, and the camera jostles around everywhere so you have no idea what the heck is going on. The actors are usually nonexistent. The plot of the movie itself can sometimes be okay, but you have to come up with a reason for why your characters are filming everything. And that reason almost always makes no sense and is stupid. (Unless it's Cloverfield, when it *kind of* made sense.) 

Pretty much everything checks out here. We're stuck with high school characters, so of course they're talking like high school characters, much to everybody's chagrin. The acting in this movie is pretty awful. The camera work is rather ludicrous. The plot of the movie is sadly pretty pathetic. Oh, and the whole camera thing? They don't even explain why they're doing it in this one. They just film for no reason. 

The plot of this movie revolves around the teenagers using blueprints and the main character's father's work to make a time machine. I'm not convinced that really any of the characters--except maybe the main one (he aspires to go to MIT)--would even be able to build such a thing. And once they build it, all the characters become pretty stupid and despite discussing well-known movies where time traveling changes reality and the need to be careful, they proceed to go into the past and end up, well, changing reality. And things start going wrong. And somehow the smart, nerdy main character ends up being the one who is the stupidest regarding his actions. 

And somehow, the ending manages to be about as stupid as can be. (If you really don't want spoilers, stop here and skip to the next paragraph... but in all fairness, you might as well read because there's a fair chance you're probably not watching a lame and quickly forgotten movie like this anyway.) They end up eliminating the timeline where they screwed things up, but it's still all on the camera they recorded it on, which they find at the end, which means they again have knowledge of the now-nonexistent timeline that no one else remembers, but there are no consequences... that we know of. Make any sense? No? Well, that's what happens. 

As you can see, Project Almanac is a mess of a film. Even if it weren't a found-footage film, it wouldn't be very good anyway due to its plot. But the fact that it is found-footage means it's even worse. And what's sad is that it takes pretty much a whole hour before we even actually start getting to the remotely interesting part where their actions affect reality... meaning you have to sit through a hour of pretty much nothing before you get to the rest of the movie, which is mostly misguided and confusing anyway. 

I've seen movies that I personally hated a lot more than this, but ended up (or would end up) getting a slightly higher rating because they had some redeeming quality to them, even if a minor one. This movie doesn't really have any redeeming qualities. It didn't have much that made me angry (besides how long it took in movie minutes for them to build the stupid machine), but I'm not sure I even cracked a smile once--besides laughing at how sloppy the ending was. To sum it up, this movie is just flat out lifeless.