Project Almanac: if I knew this was a found footage movie I wouldn’t have bothered.
Secondly, while the film centres on time travel it takes repeated liberties around the accepted ideas around time travel just to make it work. So I’m about to spoiler the **** out of this movie, and that’s usually a hint i didn't like it.
The film namechecks both Looper and Doctor Who as the premise for the movie (people can travel back in time) to accelerate exposition, but conveniently forgets the cornerstone rule of the Who franchise – never travel into your own past, because of the damage you may make to your own timeline and potentially causing a paradox – and then does it anyway.
The movie makes a point of showing what happens with duplicates (you see your past self, both disappear) but simply ignores what happens when present duplicates are seen in the same place. In one part of the movie, one of the kids fails his chemistry test and needed to pass it so he went back repeatedly to get all the answers to the questions, but in each time he travelled back there’s only one group of time travellers (themselves) rather than 2 then 3 then 4 then 5 and constantly increasing. It was always one set.
The concept of ripple effect is used to quite baffling effect. Because the main character goes back three months to kiss the main female character (resulting in them two getting together), this kicks off a chain reaction that somehow results in the basketball team (neither of which are connected or related) to lose because one of the star players’ broke their leg, which results in that guy’s father (a pilot) not being on a plane in London (to Madrid) which results in it crashing killing 77 people.
To keep the premise of the movie going, one of the rules set is to film everything. In the climax of the film, the main character goes back 10 years to his 7th birthday (where he’s seen in the mirror of his footage from the birthday party, completing the paradox that he has to go back there - but the entire film and all its characters ignores that point) to meet his alive-at-the-time father to convince him that his time machine does work, but cannot be built because of the damage it will cause. So he goes and destroys some key components and blueprints, preventing the machine being built, while leaving the camera to film the entire event.
When he destroys the equipment, he disappears entirely but the camera does not. It remains and is filming everything and is stored up with his now-dead fathers’ equipment for 10 years (with the first identical camera from the party) depicting the entire movie – which could not have possibly happened because it came from the original timeline which now never happened, because the time machine was never built in the first place to enable him to go back in time and be recorded - on tape.
A loop is still established because a future self appears in the mirror, but cannot be completed (or seen in the future) as a result of the lack of equipment needed in the future to go back in time to be seen in the mirror in the past. So how can it still be there? Assuming this is a single timeline (and not several different timelines when they change the past each time), that’s simply not possible.
Because of this, there should be only one camera, not two, and maybe no shot of him in the mirror from 10 years previous.
The final scenes of the film imply they could rebuild it again, but how can they when the equipment was destroyed? Because they have evidence of a previous run (and records of experiments) of that timeline? If they do, then the loop is established yet again by the mirror and they are doomed to repeat the entire sequence of events.
So this film just drove me crazy by the end.
But it's a happy ending apparently.
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