Project Almanac (4 Stars)

Who's Doctor Who?

This is a film about a group of teenagers in their last year at school. David Raskin discovers notes left by his father who died when he was seven, along with a prototype for a time machine. An old videotape shows 17-year-old David present at his seventh birthday party, which proves that he will successfully complete the time machine. Or already has completed the time machine. Temporal paradoxes are hard to get my head around.

Encouraged by the videotape David works to perfect the prototype, together with his sister and three friends. They travel into the past repeatedly, changing things for their own gain. For instance, one of them wins the lottery while the others make changes to get revenge on school bullies or make themselves more popular at school. Unfortunately, they haven't reckoned with time ripples, the so-called Butterfly Effect. When a plane crashes as an indirect result of a small change that he's made, David travels into the past to put things right, but ends up making things even worse.

The film is in the pseudo-documentary shaky camera style of "The Blair Witch Project". For most of the film David's sister Christina is holding the camera, so we don't see her. On some occasions the camera is put down, so we see her as well.

I love the story, and I might even have given the film five stars if it hadn't been for the shaky camera effect being so annoying. Especially in the first half of the film it was shaking too much. Later on there were explosions, and the camera image was broken up and pixellated to fake the electro-magnetic effects. This got on my nerves.