Project Almanac (8.5/10)

(For the audio version of this review, check out our new channel at SoundCloud.com/AskTheReelist in a joint recording session with SoundCloud.com/ThePopcornPanel. There isn't a video version because *ahem I screwed up the camera...)

After seeing the trailer for the movie, I was both very excited and very fearful. Excited because the trailer looked amazing, reminded me a lot of Chronicles. Fearful because not many can do a time-travelling story right.

Time-travel movies usually will suffer a lot from loopholes because, with time travel, everything becomes possible and there will be a lot of timelines involved.

But the last few years saw time-travelling movies done right. We started with Looper back in 2012, and then last year there was X-Men: Days Of Future Past. And while Project Almanac wasn't as good as the previous two, I'm happy to say that it's still better than I expected.

First of all, there's director Dean Israelite with his first full-length feature, from a script written by Andrew Deutschman - also his first credited movie (according to IMDb.com).

The pacing by Israelite was almost right. From the beginning to the end, there was consistency and I was hooked and rooting for these characters. The only time when things started to slow down was the character arch between Johnny Weston and Sofia Black-D'Elia. When there were only these specific two onscreen, that's when the pacing got thrown off.

But for Israelite to create the "best day ever" for the group, being the events at Lollapalooza, that was directed and edited very well. And to me, by employing a first-camera point-of-view, I was able to feel like I was one of the gang, and that brought me into the movie even more.

And I really liked this cast of unknowns. Weston and Black-D'Elia had good chemistry. Allen Evangelista and Virginia Gardner played competent supporting roles, and Sam Lerner was hilarious in one sequence involving a test.

The next three paragraphs may contain SPOILERS so skip if you don't want to take the risk.

I loved how the last scene in the movie was opened for interpretation and discussion. Did Weston's character "rebuilt" the time machine or not? Or did he just saw everything that has happened from the previous recording?

I really liked how this movie paid homage to the previous time-travelling movies. There were very brief name dropping of Looper and Groundhog Day. But my favourite was the one that made reference to the original Back To The Future, the scene where Doc Brown was atop the clock tower trying to join the two wires together. No other movies have managed to re-capture that scene as well as this movie.

I did say time-travel movies are hard to avoid loopholes so here's a jarring one. When Weston's character first jumped back in time alone, we never saw what happened to his self in that timeline. Obviously he had to distract that self, but it would have been better to see it because we all saw the danger of what would happen should two selves meet.

But other than that, I don't have any other big question marks. I do plan to watch this again, soon, just to see if I had miss anything; but for now, I loved this movie.