Shawn Levy’s The Adam Project sends Ryan Reynolds back through time in a stolen jet. It runs 106 minutes, carries the tagline “Past meets future,” and splits its time between adventure, science fiction and comedy. The film was written by Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin, T.S. Nowlin and Jonathan Tropper.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Reynolds and Scobell Carry the Load
The pairing is the best thing in the movie. Reynolds plays Big Adam, a fighter pilot from a dystopian 2050 who steals a time jet to save his wife, Laura, from assassination. He is injured during the escape and crash-lands in 2022 instead. Walker Scobell, in his film debut, plays Young Adam — a bullied, asthmatic sixth grader suspended from school and drifting away from his mother, Ellie, after his father died the year before.
Scobell holds his own against Reynolds. Levy, his producers and casting director Carmen Cuba auditioned hundreds of young actors before landing on him. The kid has the timing.
The two Adams do not trust each other at first. Young Adam comes around when his future self recites details of his life and knows his dog. That is a thin hinge for a whole movie, but it gets them moving.
The Plot and Where It Slips
The mission is a rescue. Big Adam wants to reach Laura in 2018, and he brings his younger self along once his injuries heal. Zoe Saldaña plays Laura, a fellow time pilot who faked her death and has been living off-grid. She saves the two Adams from Maya Sorian, the leader of the 2050 world, and her enforcer Christos, using a gun and the plasmic MAG/CYL.
Then the film explains itself. Louis Reed, Adam’s father, invented time travel. Mark Ruffalo plays him as a brilliant quantum physicist who wrote the algorithm for controlled time travel before dying in a 2021 car accident. Catherine Keener’s Sorian funded his research, then took the discovery after his death and built a future where she is the most powerful woman in the world. She keeps visiting her 2018 self to protect that outcome.
That is a clean science-fiction idea. The film does not trust it, and the middle stretch turns into a chase that repeats itself.
Keener and the Rest of the Cast
Keener is the strongest asset in the back half. She plays both the 2050 Sorian and, through de-aging, her younger self, with Lucie Guest as her body double. The doubled role is the most interesting thing the script attempts, because it makes the villain’s power a matter of logistics rather than menace. She is not evil in a grand way. She is an executive protecting an investment.
Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner are underused. Garner plays Ellie, and also her younger self in 2018. Alex Mallari Jr. plays Christos as a ruthless security enforcer who used to be Adam and Laura’s colleague, and the film never bothers to make that history mean anything.
- The Reynolds-Scobell scenes, which carry the comedy and most of the feeling.
- Keener’s double turn as Sorian in two timelines.
- The 2018 visit to Louis Reed, where the film finally slows down.
- The underground particle accelerator assault at Sorian Technologies.
- Laura’s sacrifice, which the film treats as a plot beat rather than a loss.
That ordering is also the film’s problem. The emotional material sits at the top, and everything the movie spends its budget on sits below it.
Two Movies in One
The Adam Project wants to be two things at once, and the split shows.
| Element | What it does well | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Time travel premise | Sorian monopolizing Louis’s discovery is a sharp idea | The mechanics get explained and then ignored |
| Father-son story | Ruffalo and Reynolds get one good scene in 2018 | Louis refuses to help, then changes his mind off-screen |
| Action | The MAG/CYL and the time jet look expensive | The chases repeat without raising stakes |
| Villain | Keener’s two-timeline Sorian | Christos is a body with no interior |
The comparison is not close. Every time the film cuts from the family material back to the pursuit, it loses ground.
The 1980s movies this clearly draws on had the same budget problems and solved them with personality. The Adam Project has personality in Reynolds and Scobell, and then spends it.
What the Numbers Say
Netflix released The Adam Project in a limited “one night only” theatrical run on March 9, 2022, then streamed it on March 11. Rob Simonsen composed the score. Production first began in 2012 with Tom Cruise attached to star, then sat in development until Netflix took the distribution rights. Filming ran from November 2020 to March 2021.
None of that history shows on screen, which is its own kind of disappointment. A movie that spent a decade in development should have a point of view. This one has a premise.
It ranks as the third most popular movie on Netflix worldwide, with 157.6 million views in its first 28 days. That figure says more about the platform’s reach than the film’s quality. The Adam Project is watchable, well-cast and forgettable — the kind of thing that plays fine on a couch and leaves nothing behind. Scobell is the reason to watch it. Everything else is scaffolding around a kid who deserved a better script.
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