You know I had never hear of an almanac before Back To The Future; and with the exception of a few visits to a newsagents every so often, it's not a word, or a tome, that I'm familair with. Still, the movie has been named after such a wordy piece of literature. The film is shot in the love-it-or-loathe-it style of being recorded on a video camera by one of the characters at a time. The film is a cautionary time travel tale based around some young science boffins who find blue prints for a time machine device. Naturally they go back in time to do great things - if you think great things are winning the lottery by getting the numbers before they come out, going to sold out music festivals and to woo the girl of your dreams. It's all going swimmingly until they find that even the most smallest change can make a big ripple in the time continuum.
The Michael Bay produced, MTV film, is a product of contemporary film making - doing the whole amateur video camera thing (aka found footage) is getting a bit old now, but it seems to work for this film, even if some of the camera work is frustrating. A lot of the time the characters hold the camera in stupid positions so sometimes it really awkward to see what's going on and have to rely on the speech of the characters to help out.
It a thought provoking story and the acting isn't too bad - it's a typically trendy movie - even though these guys are nerds, they are still like extras from a boy band and all the girls are perfectly made up and pretty - even though one of them is supposed to be bullied at school and plain. Still, the story more than makes up for this and does bring up some salient questions - what would you do with a time machine?
There's a lot of movies that do this wobbly camcorder recording (I'm looking at you Chronicle and Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity: Marked Ones). However a lot of the time it's annoying and falls flat - Chronicle had so much potential but it lost the ball many times - and Marked Ones was just as bad. In a way, this has this legacy, but I thought this movie was good enough to be watchable and to be honest I enjoyed it. I'm not sure if it would have worked in a traditional sense, and I guess this is to time travel movies what Cloverfield is for monster movies, or what Chronicle is to superhero movies.
Overall a good attempt at an original time travel movie, immediatley watchable, but also makes you think.
Project Almanac is out this Friday, 20th February 2015 at all good cinemas.
POPSCORE: 7/10
What is it? Michael Bay produced movie, Project Alamanac
Where do I find out more? http://www.projectalmanac.com/
If you liked this try - Chronicle, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity: Marked Ones, Super 8
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