From absurd dashcam footage to amusing cat videos, it’s pretty safe to assume that the vast majority of real-world recordings are completely banal in nature – so why is it that Found Footage movies are almost exclusively associated with the horror genre? If you really think about it, we should have seen major Found Footage entries in pretty much every single genre by now, and yet filmmakers still insist on trying to make the next Blair Witch Project year after year.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for POV horror flicks, but I also enjoy a nice little palate cleanser every now and then. That’s why I appreciate rare exceptions like Dean Israelite’s Project Almanac, a sci-fi Found Footage romp that takes advantage of subjective filmmaking in an admirable attempt at updating age-old time travel tropes for a new generation.
If you haven’t heard of it before, Project Almanac tells the story of a group of teenagers involved in a time travelling conspiracy after David (Jonny Weston) uncovers blueprints for a time machine that his father (Gary Weeks) was working on before his mysterious death. Naturally, hormone-influenced shenanigans ensue as David and his friends decide to travel back in time for personal gain – only to discover that even the smallest changes can have disastrous consequences for the future.
Produced through Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes, Project Almanac was already an unusual endeavor coming out of the gate, being the production company’s second non-horror film after 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot. Not only that, but it was also a bit of a gamble in the financial department, with the film boasting a surprisingly large budget for a Found Footage flick despite not featuring any superpowered characters or city-destroying monsters.
While the movie would ultimately rake in nearly three times its budget at the box-office, this success didn’t extend to its critical reception. Several media outlets unfairly condemned the picture as a mediocre cash-grab meant to ride the coattails of the found footage films that inspired it, while others were even more critical of its murky time travel logic.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Time travel flicks may be a dime a dozen, but I guarantee that you’ve never seen one quite like this before. Sure, Project Almanac’s script touches on highly familiar ground as David attempts to rectify past mistakes only to make things infinitely worse in the future, but these tried-and-true tropes are made fresh again by the story’s singular perspective.
The film firmly plants viewers in the shoes of these relatable protagonists, and though it can be argued that the producers graduated from the Netflix school of casting obvious adults as teenagers, I personally thought that these characters were likable enough to make the experience worthwhile. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that David, Christina (Virginia Gardner), Jesse (Sofia Black-D’Elia) and the rest were way less irritating than characters from other similarly teen-focused found footage movies like Project X (even though that film benefited from a young Miles Teller).
Project Almanac is also a guaranteed treat for fans of Back to the Future, with the film boasting plenty of callbacks to Zemeckis’ iconic trilogy (with the film’s title itself referencing Biff’s time-travelling schemes from Part II) without necessarily recreating any of the same moments or even relying on its outdated ruleset for temporal distortion. While the script’s internal logic often doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny, as the story features a handful of poorly executed paradoxes, I don’t think that really matters when you’re having fun along the way – which is certainly the case here.
In fact, I think the film’s disproportionately poor reception can only be explained by a severe case of Found Footage fatigue, as most critics seemed to dismiss this genuinely entertaining thriller simply because it came hot on the heels of countless Paranormal Activity sequels and more successful FF experiments like Chronicle.
WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Project Almanac doesn’t feature any overt scares or even a foreboding atmosphere (I mean, most of the film takes place around high school parties and upbeat music festivals), but I’d argue that the film still features some exceptionally thrilling use of Found Footage simply because it does such a great establishing its characters that we actually end up fearing for their future.
It also helps that the movie features plenty of believable POV shots of global catastrophes, with some of this effects-driven imagery eerily bringing to mind real world tragedies. There are also a handful of moments where our protagonists are forced to confront the looming threat of complete non-existence due to their temporal meddling. These darker bits never quite take over the narrative, but the existential conundrum of collapsing timelines is taken a lot more seriously here than in Back to the Future.
Project Almanac doesn’t quite reinvent the time travel or the found footage wheel, relying on age-old tropes to tell its story and expecting an excessive amount of suspension of disbelief from the viewer (I’m still not too keen on the flick’s ultra-crisp big budget photography), but that doesn’t necessarily deem it a failure. For all its flaws, Israelite’s movie is still a highly enjoyable and unexpectedly humorous ride that deserves a larger fanbase among sci-fi and found footage enthusiasts. It may not be the best that the genre has to offer, but it doesn’t really have to be when there are so few of its kind out there.
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.