David Raskin builds a time machine in his basement and sends his friends back to the day before, and the movie spends the rest of its running time watching them mess things up. Project Almanac is a found-footage science-fiction thriller about a group of teenagers who stumble across plans for a time machine, build it, and quickly learn that changing the past has consequences nobody expected. The film was directed by Dean Israelite, making his directorial debut, and written by Jason Pagan and Andrew Deutschman. It stars Jonny Weston as David Raskin, Sofia Black-D’Elia as Jessie Pierce, Sam Lerner as Quinn Goldberg, Allen Evangelista as Adam Le, Virginia Gardner as Christina Raskin, and Amy Landecker as Kathy Raskin.
The premise is simple enough. David, a high-school senior who wants to attend MIT, discovers that his father, Ben Raskin, left behind plans for a time machine. His father died on David’s seventh birthday, and the house is full of old boxes and unfinished projects. David, his sister Christina, and his friends Adam and Quinn search through the belongings, looking for anything that might help David win a scholarship. They find a camera with a recording of David’s seventh birthday party, and in the video, young David briefly sees his adult self in a mirror. The adult David reaches for a basement light switch. The group pulls the switch, opens a trapdoor, and finds blueprints for a time-travel device that Ben was building for DARPA, a government agency. They build the machine, send a toy car back in time, and cause a blackout in their neighborhood. They recruit David’s crush, Jessie Pierce, into the experiment, and the five of them start jumping backward, testing the limits of the machine.
The film runs 106 minutes and was released on January 30, 2015. It was filmed in 2013, with an original plan for an early 2014 release that later moved. The movie earned $33 million against a production budget of $12 million, according to Wikipedia, and it received generally mixed reviews from critics and audiences.
Trailer, via Rotten Tomatoes Trailers.
The Found-Footage Problem
The film is shot as found footage, a technique that has been used in horror movies for years but rarely in science fiction. The idea is that the whole story is presented as a collection of video recordings made by the characters themselves. In practice, that means the screen is often filled with shaky handheld shots, grainy images, and actors talking directly into the camera. The effect is meant to create a sense of immediacy and realism, but it also forces the audience to watch the same conversations from multiple angles and at close range. The result is a film that feels cramped and repetitive, even when the story is moving fast.
The technique works better in horror films, where the fear comes from what the audience cannot see. In a time-travel movie, the stakes are intellectual and emotional, not visceral. The found-footage format flattens those stakes. The audience sees the same arguments, the same experiments, and the same disasters over and over, from slightly different perspectives. The film never quite commits to the tone it is trying to establish. It wants to be a tense thriller, but the format keeps getting in the way.
David and His Friends
Jonny Weston plays David, a smart kid who wants to build something that will change his life. He is earnest and nervous, the kind of character who believes in his own ideas even when everyone around him thinks he is crazy. Sofia Black-D’Elia plays Jessie Pierce, David’s longtime crush, and she brings a cool, skeptical energy to the role. Sam Lerner plays Quinn Goldberg, the best friend who is always willing to go along with a bad idea. Allen Evangelista plays Adam Le, the other best friend, and Virginia Gardner plays Christina, David’s sister. Amy Landecker plays Kathy Raskin, David and Christina’s mother, and Gary Weeks plays Ben Raskin, their father.
The group is supposed to be a tight-knit unit, but the film does not spend enough time establishing why they care about each other. Their motivations are mostly practical: David wants the scholarship, Quinn wants to impress his girlfriend, Jessie wants to help her friends. The emotional bonds feel thin, and the drama between them is mostly about who gets to use the machine next. There is no real chemistry between the leads, and the dialogue is often stiff and unnatural. The actors are doing their best with material that is not very good, and the film does not give them much room to breathe.
The Time Machine Itself
The time machine in Project Almanac is a box built in a basement, powered by a car battery and a few wires. It is not a sleek, futuristic device. It is a makeshift contraption that looks like it was put together in a garage. The film explains that Ben was working on the machine for DARPA, but it never shows how the device actually works. The audience is told that the machine can send objects and people back in time, but the rules of the process are vague. The film establishes that the machine has a limited capacity, and that the group can only jump back a few weeks at most. Beyond that, the mechanics are left unexplained.
The film also introduces a feedback loop, a situation where the present version of a person interacts with their past self and creates a disturbance in the timeline. This is a classic time-travel trope, but the film handles it poorly. The loop causes the characters to nearly erase each other from existence, and the film suggests that the machine itself might be unstable. The problem is that the film does not establish the rules clearly enough for the audience to understand what is happening. The loop is introduced suddenly, and the consequences are explained in broad terms rather than specific ones. The audience is left wondering how the machine works and why it behaves the way it does.
The Feedback Loop
The feedback loop is the central threat in the film. When Quinn draws on the back of his sleeping past self’s neck, the past Quinn wakes up, and the two versions of the character exist at once. The film shows the loop visually, with the two Quinns overlapping in the frame. The scene is tense, but it is also confusing. The audience is not sure what the loop means or how it will resolve. The film eventually resolves the loop, but the resolution is abrupt and under-explained.
The loop is a good idea, but the execution is weak. The film does not set up the rules of time travel clearly enough for the audience to follow what happens when two versions of a person occupy the same space. The scene is meant to be scary, but it is also frustrating, because the audience does not know what is happening. The film relies on visual spectacle rather than clear explanation, and the payoff is not satisfying. The loop is a missed opportunity, and it leaves the audience feeling lost rather than thrilled.
The Mixed Reception
Critics were not impressed with the film. The review aggregator website holds an average critic rating of 4.7 out of 10, based on a sample of 24 reviews. The audience score is lower, at 3.9 out of 10. The film was not a failure by any measure. It earned $33 million against a budget of $12 million, which is a modest profit. But the reception was poor, and the film has not aged well. It is remembered as a forgettable entry in the found-footage genre, a movie that tried to do something new and ended up doing nothing well.
The film’s defenders might argue that it is a fun, low-budget adventure that is not meant to be taken seriously. That is a fair point, but the film does not succeed as pure entertainment either. The plot is convoluted, the characters are thin, and the scares are predictable. The film tries to be both a tense thriller and a character study, and it fails at both. It is a movie that is easy to dismiss, and it has been dismissed for years.
The Music and the Lollapalooza Sequence
The film includes a sequence set at Lollapalooza, a music festival. Members of the rock bands Imagine Dragons and Atlas Genius appear briefly as themselves during the movie’s Lollapalooza sequence. The inclusion of real musicians adds a touch of authenticity to the film, but it is a small moment in a long runtime. The sequence is not essential to the story, and it does not add much to the overall narrative. It is a curiosity, not a highlight.
The music in the film is standard for the genre. There is a score, and there are licensed tracks, but none of it stands out. The film is not memorable for its sound design, and the music does not elevate the material. The Lollapalooza sequence is a brief detour, and the film returns to its basement setting soon after. The sequence is a minor footnote in a movie that is otherwise focused on the time machine and its effects.
The Comparison Table
| Element | Project Almanac | Common Time-Travel Films |
|---|---|---|
| Format | Found footage | Traditional narrative |
| Setting | High school basement | Multiple locations |
| Tone | Tense and claustrophobic | Tense and expansive |
| Stakes | Personal and financial | Universal and cosmic |
| Budget | Low ($12 million) | Moderate to high |
The comparison table shows how Project Almanac differs from the typical time-travel film. The found-footage format is a deliberate choice, but it limits the scope of the story. The film is trapped in a basement, and the characters cannot escape the immediate problems around them. The tone is tense, but it is also claustrophobic. The audience is stuck with the characters, and there is no relief. The stakes are personal, but they are not universal. The film is about a scholarship, a house, and a broken family, not about the fate of the world. The budget is low, and the film reflects that constraint.
The Verdict
Project Almanac is a flawed but entertaining movie. It has a clever premise, a committed cast, and a few tense moments. But the found-footage format, the weak character development, and the vague time-travel rules hold it back. The film is not a disaster, but it is not a success either. It is a movie that is easy to watch and easy to forget.
The film’s strengths are its premise and its cast. The premise is clever, and the idea of a group of teenagers stumbling across a time machine is inherently interesting. The cast is young and energetic, and they sell the excitement of the experiment. The film is at its best when it is showing the characters figuring out how the machine works and what they can do with it. Those moments are genuinely fun, and they are the reason the film is still worth seeing.
But the weaknesses are significant. The found-footage format is a burden, not a benefit. The character development is thin, and the audience never understands why these people are friends or what they want beyond the scholarship. The time-travel rules are vague, and the feedback loop is a missed opportunity. The film is a mixed bag, and the mixed bag is mostly empty.
The film’s legacy is modest. It was a modest success, a decently reviewed film that disappeared from memory quickly. It is not a movie that people talk about, and it is not a movie that changed the genre. It is a movie that exists, and it is a movie that is worth seeing once, for the premise and the cast, but not a movie that demands a second viewing.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
