Project Almanac

David's a brilliant high schooler, but he needs to find some way to pay for college without his mother selling the house. Then he finds out his dad was involved in an attempt to build a time machine at some point before he died. So he and his younger sister and his two friends manage to make a working time machine. Of course they all agree to follow strict rules about not going back alone, and recording everything. And, of course, those rules eventually get broken.

I definitely did not watch closely enough to catch how their actions caused the ripple effects they did. I just kind of assume all of them (especially Quinn) making themselves more popular threw off the social climate in the school and things spiraled from there. I don't see how that explains the fires in Brazil, but the basketball star getting hit by a car at a party, or the mean girl's father dying in a plane crash, maybe.

Actually, I think it'd be funny if the fires in Brazil happened originally, it was just none of them noticed because they were caught up in their own lives. Then they're already panicking about other butterfly effects, so they just assume their going to Lollapalooza caused forest fires thousands of miles away. Something about adolescent arrogance, I guess.

Two things I like about the effects of time travel. The way they jump back to the present and don't know why things are different. They've created changes, but skipped past all of them, so David gets congratulated on a party he threw last week that he has no memory of it. Like they've stolen the lives of another version of themselves.

The other bit was just a visual effect. How they would almost lag, or glitch out, if they met another version of themselves. The way each version would start to repeat words in an echo. It just looked cool, while I know it would be terrifying to actually see that happen to your friend. I especially like that the movie establishes this by Quinn pulling a dumb prank on himself. Even though they said they were going to be careful with this, and they do try, with David warning them not to hold their breath, and keep their eyes shut against the UV, they're still wielding an incredible amount of power they don't fully understand. 

They went along with the prank because they didn't see the harm. Because until they've actually seen what happens when your past and present self see each other, they don't know there's a danger. Sure, practically every time travel movie ever suggests it's a dangerous thing to do, and unlike a lot of zombies movies that pretend zombie movies don't exist, this movie does acknowledge that time travel is a concept people are familiar with, but those are just movies. What do they know, right?

I'm a little surprised we never got a moment where they time traveled, and one of them ended up partially merged with a wall. After showing it happen with the toy car, and the fact that when they use the machine themselves, they end up thrown apart, I felt sure we'd see that. Especially as David grew more desperate to fix things.