This is a movie that I watched in cable tv while I was in a hotel in Bandung with my wife on 26 February 2016 (that trip will be reviewed in her blog "yennymakanmulu").
It's a film about time travel using "found footage camera" method (see below for clarity on this).
The film revolves around 5 high school students, i.e David Raskin-the genius, Christina Raskin-the sister, Jessie Pierce-the girlfriend, Quinn Goldberg & Adam Le-the best friends.
Story starts with a home video taken by Christina for David's application to MIT by making a model airplane flying "using" his hands. His best friends Quinn & Adam also helped during this video making.
After waiting for many days, the response from MIT finally came. They have accepted David in MIT, but unfortunately only give partial scholarship. David's mother upon knowing this issue tried to mortgage their house, so David feel bad and try to do new projects to get more financing. While searching for inspiration in the attic of their house, he and Christina found an old video camera of their father Ben who passed away when he was a child due to car accident. When both of them watched the video of David's 7th birthday party, there was a glimpse of David's grown up shadow on the window. David, Christina, Quinn and Adam are all confused how this could happen, so they searched through the basement of David's house where Ben put all his experiments (he is also inventor working for the US government) to look for clues. Here they found a particular experiment called "project almanac" which is a device created to do "time travel".
After looking for the stuff to create the device, they did a test run but it was unsuccessful as it requires bigger power. So later they stole the battery from Jessie's car which was parked at their neighbor's house during a party (Jessie is the girl in school that David is very interested in, but he did not dare to follow up). Using the battery, they did another test on the device and managed to send a toy car back for 1 minute. Jessie found out about this when she was checking out the basement and was there during this experiment. She then was asked to join with the rest of them for their time travels.
They created their own rule of only doing time travel when there is 5 of them together. Because of the limitation of the device, they can only go back in time maximum 3 weeks. They started to perform various small time travels to "rectify" their high school problems, such as acing pop quiz for Quinn, fight off Christina's bullies and including winning a lottery for Adam where the money was distributed amongst them and David was able to give his portion to his mother to avoiding their house mortgaged. During these time travels, Jessie and David become closer.
Finally they went back to 3 weeks earlier where they went to a major rock concert. They had very wonderful time, but David hesitated to state his feeling to Jessie and regretted it. After that trip, they seemed to be growing apart and David could not accept it. So against his better judgement, he traveled back alone to that concert and stated his feeling to Jessie there and then and they finally could become a couple. However, this small trip resulted to different effects on their lives, and some are worse than before. David keep on getting back alone to rectify this situation but ending up making everything worse every time, including losing Jessie.
Ultimately, there will be consequences if you mess with nature.
Can David and Jessie relationship be mended? What will happen to the device? Can David save the world from turning to worse? The answer to all these can be seen if you watch the film till the end.
I actually had a good moment watching this movie. In fact I can also feel these 5 teenagers' excitement of doing time travel. Maybe I am biased as I always love time travel story, but this film somehow feels very simple and easy to understand. No complicated things like in "Inception" or even the last "Terminator" movie... :)
The found footage method is not making me nauseous and I can tolerate most of them enough to enjoy. It is a small budget movie, so do not expect big names in the film and there will not be big explosions, or heavy car chases. This is a simple time travel story.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Note:
Found footage is a film genre in which all or mostly the film is presented as if it were a discovered film or video recordings. We will see through the camera of the characters involved and usually there are comments from the character as well. Notable films are "Cloverfield", "Chronicle" and "Paranormal Activity" series. You can search for more detailed info in the internet.
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