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Project Almanac (Blu-ray)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Paramount Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (7th June 2015). |
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The Film
 When high school genius David Raskin's (Jonny Weston) hopes of a full-ride scholarship to M.I.T. are dashed, his mother Kathy (Amy Landecker) who has evidently been job-searching for the past seven years since her physicist husband's (Gary Weeks) tragic death puts the house up for sale. Trying to meet the deadline for one of the few remaining scholarships in which he has to submit an original experiment proposal that he evidently did not bother looking into before David desperately searches through the attic for any of his father's old projects in the attic. His sister Christina (Virginia Gardner) this "found footage" film's character with a maddening mania for filming everything instead discovers their father's video camera which has on it David's seventh birthday party (the last thing he shot before rushing off for a meeting and getting into a car accident). While watching the video, David is shocked to discover the reflection of his grown self in a mirror during the party. Despite clear video evidence, Christina insists that he is just seeing what he wants to see; but she and his equally skeptical pals Quinn (Sam Lerner) and Adam (Allen Evangelista) help him reenact his movements on the tape, leading them down to their father's basement lab which they were forbidden to enter. In a hidden compartment, they discover the blueprints and the electrical core of a "temporal relocation device" (i.e. "time machine" as they explain to audience surrogate Christina) that his father had purportedly been developing with the military organization D.A.R.P.A. (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Since the birthday party video evidence suggests that they have indeed managed to successfully use it, David, Adam, and Quinn start experimenting with ways to power the device as well as a graphical interface to control it via smart phone (as David had already done with a drone for his M.I.T. audition video) while Christina documents the experiment titled "Project Almanac". The device is so energy consuming that it blows out banks of store-bought batteries, but a neighborhood house party provides a unique opportunity when David's crush Jessie (Sofia Black-D'Elia) parks her electric car in his driveway. Hooking up the device to her battery, they manage to blowing out the power for the entire neighborhood but also manage to send a toy car back in time. They are caught by Jesse, but her distinctive keychain marks her as already involved since David is seen with it in his hand on the birthday party video. As their tests progress and their success in increasing the amount of time in which they can send objects back, David is the only one who seems apprehensive about actually sending themselves back in time but relents when Jessie pushes him. Their first successful attempt nearly erases Quinn from the timeline altogether when he and his past self meet. Realizing the possibilities with an "of course" to going back and killing Hitler they go back and change little things in their lives. Quinn aces his chemistry test (after a series of do-overs that embolden him to showboat to the class), Christina turns the tables on her own bully Sarah (Michelle DeFraites), and Adam "picks" the winning lottery numbers (also meaning that David's and Christina's mom does not need to sell the house); but David's M.I.T. dreams take a back seat to their popularity. When they decide to bolster their social media presence by travelling back to Lollapalooza three months before with used backstage passes they bought on eBay, David falters in declaring his love to Jessie but does not realize it until he is able to pinpoint the moment on video. Breaking the group's cardinal rule that they all travel together, David goes back and seizes the day. Upon returning, he finds himself in a happy relationship with Jessie but increasingly aware of how disconnected he has grown from her and his friend as he has no idea of the other resultant changes to the timeline between Lollapalooza and the present. When Sarah's pilot father dies in a tragic plane crash, the group start to believe that their initial experiment may have caused it since her father might have been at the high school football championships had the team's star player not broken his leg at the party the night they blew out the neighborhood power grid. In their calculation of the direct chain of events (without knowledge of David's change), they also link other world catastrophes to their alternation which has David trying to keep them from making such intuitive leaps was well as trying to deflect suspicion from himself. Desperate to undo the tragedy without undoing his own relationship with Jessie (or exposing his duplicity), David decides to go back; but his series of do-overs only serve to make things worse in increasingly unpredictable ways.   Despite the involvement of producer (Michael Bay), Project Almanac manages to be a stimulating science fiction film. The frivolity with which the teenage characters treat their discovery is understandable and relatable even infectious in the case of the "I'm everywhere, bitch!" scene and their privileging popularity over scientific recognition; as, of course, is the realization only of the repercussions of their acts when tragedy hits close to home. A clichι of some science fiction lampooned in Monty Python's alien Scotsman sketch is the use of a pretty female character as an audience surrogate to explain scientific terms and tech-heavy plot turns; and this film has two, although one at least also functions as the love interest in another clichι of a scientist who breaks his own rules to attain a woman he believes is so unattainable. The punishment for David's betrayal of her trust is not the worldwide tragedies but his estrangement from the Jessie he has come to know or to know and savor their relationship as it has developed. The film's circular ending is less tiresome than usual as the characters had no time to effectively create a message that could warn off their past selves from making the exact same mistakes. I suppose we can also be thankful that the scenario is not further cluttered by speculation over David's father's death or the mysterious D.A.R.P.A. lurking around. While more seasoned science fiction viewers may have seen some of the film's concepts given better treatment elsewhere, Project Almanac makes a good "primer" for the current demographic, and is a more interesting and engaging piece of science fiction for teenagers than other "young adult" efforts whose dystopian universes play second fiddle to tiresome love triangles between Mary Sues and their handsome admirers.  
Video
Paramount's BD50 MPEG-4 AVC 2.40:1 widescreen presentation is top of the line when one considers how much manipulation went into making the film look like it was amateurishly shot with lower tier camera equipment. Contrasts are pushed, skin tones are warmer, highlights are sometimes blown out, and detail is sometimes deliberately reduced.  
Audio
Audio options include an active and immersive lossless English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that is entertaining enough to make one forget that most of the cameras used by the characters within the film would likely be recording in stereo. Also included are a Dolby Digital 5.1 English Descriptive Audio track and lossy Dolby Digital dubs in French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The DVD side has the English 5.1 track in Dolby Digital and drops the Portuguese dub. Both have English, English HoH, French, Portuguese, and Spanish subtitle options.  
Extras
There are no commentary options or behind the scenes featurettes (even EPK talking heads). Instead, the series of alternate and deleted scenes speaks of how the film was presumably reshaped via test screenings. The alternate opening (3:29) is superior for attentive viewers in being less drawn out with exposition compared to the version in the feature. A few of the deleted scenes (9:10) were reworked in the finished film in different locations and in different places; one or two because the direction and performances in these scenes feels too loose and undisciplined while the photography of one just looks poor (even within the context of a film purporting to be shot amateurishly by the characters). Only the loss of the final deleted scene "Quinn Confronts David" (1:52) is truly regrettable as it really touches upon the more egomaniacal side of David (who feels entitled by growing up without a father and his greater contribution to the construction of the machine to break the very rules he set). The first of the alternate endings "Going Somewhere" (2:34) feels like a less polished version of the film version while the other "My 7th Birthday" (2:11) is illogical unless there are some other alternate scenes not included here to justify it. There are no other extras or trailers on the Blu-ray while the otherwise barebones DVD side of the package has previews for Interstellar, Terminator: Genisys, and The Spongebob Movie.  
Overall
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