Nerds That Geek Movie Review: ‘Project Almanac’

Written by Scott Edwards

​If you had the ability to go back in time and make your life better, would you do it? I know that there is a resounding yes from the masses on the matter and I would be in the same boat. Not wanting to think about the consequences of what could happen if you changed the outcome of your life however starts to make me wonder if it would really be worth it. Without anyone being able to travel through time that we know of, we do not know what would happen to the world, much less ourselves when we get back and that is a frightening thought. I just hope when time travel is unlocked, that we use it for the benefit of the world, rather than the individual. 

David Raskin is a smart kid and wants to take his smarts to the next level and applies for a full ride scholarship at MIT. Thirty days after sending in his next attempt, he receives a letter back from the office of admissions and although he gets into the school, there is a snag. He is only given five thousand dollars in the scholarship and that leaves him and his mother trying to figure out how to get the other forty thousand that would cover the first year.  Brain storming with his friends at school, David comes home to see that his struggling mother has put the house up for sale to pay for his future.

Not wanting to be a burden, David tries to find one his father’s ideas from back when he was alive to try and capitalize on it for his last attempt at getting another scholarship, but only finding an old camcorder in the attic, David is starting to let go of his dream. But watching the tape that was left in the old unit, he sees something that has blown his mind, his grown-up self at his own birthday party when he was seven. Showing the tape to his friends and sister, they try to figure out what they are seeing and follow the clues from the tape to find a hidden compartment in his father’s caged off workspace. Seeing blueprints from DARPA, the group start putting one and one together and find out that David’s father was trying to crack the code of time travel. Wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps, David takes the next steps in trying to get the seemingly harmless hard drive started and see if what they have seen on the sheets and read about in the notes is at all possible.

Assembling the machine, the group isn't able to muster enough power to keep it running to produce a leap, but when David sees his crush pull up in her hybrid, he knows the secret is in the battery that they use. Hooking up jumper cables to power his machine, the group is able to transport a toy car back in time two hours. This only being the start, Jessie suggests that they start on human trials as soon as possible and the group is able to go back in time twenty-four hours. Seeing that it worked when Quinn draws on the back of his own sleeping neck, the group has unlocked something that has never been tampered with before. With the ability to travel through time at their fingertips, the group comes up with plans of how to fix things in their lives, but every time they go back in time, something massive changes in their lives going forward. When seeing this, the group decides that they will only travel together to minimize the ripple effects that they have seen, but when David wants a second chance at love, he takes matters into his own hands and things start to get out of control.

This is a pretty good premise when it comes to time travel stories, I liked how the ripple effects, no matter how small started to show right away after time started to be messed with. The group goes through experiments left and right to make their own future better and even wind up winning the lottery once, but not for too much money. I liked watching David try to walk in his father’s footsteps when the time was right and wanting to enhance the machines capabilities is his number one priority so he and the group can travel back in time further and further. David’s breakdown however is the best and when he loses focus of what the group has promised to do, he is on his own and nobody will be able to help him. Some people say that there are no second chances, but this movie goes to prove that wrong. Happy Viewing.

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