Mark Reviews Movies: THE ADAM PROJECT

The Adam Project, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 10, 2022

When we're young, the allure of time travel consists of all the adventures one could imagine—visiting the ancient and prehistoric past, watching history unfold, getting a glimpse of what the future holds. With age, though, sometimes comes wisdom, and there is some of that in The Adam Project, which features a time-traveling adventure but is much better when it's about trying to reclaim what time inevitably takes from all of us.

The filmmakers seem to know the importance of that idea. In director Shawn Levy's film, we never see the world of 2050, from which our time traveler comes, but when we first see him revisiting a particular moment of his youth, Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) is petting his childhood dog, which somehow recognizes this older version of its owner and is resting its head in his lap. Who needs adventure?

The plot of this time-hopping tale does, as Adam has to travel backwards 32 years in order to find a loved one and uncover a space-time-unraveling conspiracy. Instead of 2018, though, he ends up in 2022, which makes for a distinct difference in his own life. In the year to which Adam was supposed to travel, his father was teaching and developing an equation that, some years in the future, would become the foundation of time travel. Adam was just a kid with a new puppy, and his parents seemed happy.

In 2022, though, Adam's father has been dead for a bit more than a year. His mother Ellie (Jennifer Garner) is juggling work and being a single mother, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for her to keep up the façade that everything is all right. Meanwhile, 12-year-old Adam (Walker Scobell) has a smart mouth and a pretty cynical attitude—even for a pre-teen. He keeps getting into fights—well, getting beaten up—at school, and the kid's mouth and attitude don't cease when it comes to his mother, either.

The older Adam, who has improved his manner in many ways (although not enough that we can't appreciate how well Scobell is impersonating his older counterpart's usual screen persona), can hardly recognize himself at that age, and at first, he can barely stand the pain-in-the-ass kid he used to be. After seeing how much the older stranger who shows up at his house knows about his life, the younger Adam figures out pretty quickly that this man is himself from the future.

All of this works, and in scenes removed from the necessity of its plot, the screenplay (written by Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett, and Mark Levin) works quite well. There's that brief but understatedly touching moment with the dog, and later, the older Adam, getting a drink at the local bar, consoles his frustrated and grieving mother, because his kid self doesn't know any better, how to, or that she even needs comfort in the first place.

This doesn't even touch upon the distinctions of grief for Adam over his father's death—still raw for the youngster but turned into anger for the man—or how, why, and what happens when his dad (played by Mark Ruffalo, with no small amount of affection) eventually figures into this story. It can be said, though, that the buildup of how these characters are or aren't dealing with grief leads to a surprisingly sincere emotional payoff.

If this sounds serious and melancholy, it is to a certain degree, but that doesn't mean the filmmakers haven't also based their time-traveling adventure around a sense of, well, adventure. It's simply more routine and less involving than the ways the screenwriters and Levy ground their science-fiction tale in something achingly human.

The fun here lies in the ways the older Adam tries to teach his younger self about confidence (standing up to a bully) and learning to see what's really important, as well as how the younger Adam simultaneously admires (the muscles and an actual sex life) and scoffs at (noting that he sacrificed intelligence for his physical form) the man he will become. Some amusing arguments about the workings of time travel keep the tone light, too ("We watched way too many movies," the older Adam laments after being hit by an onslaught of theories from his younger self).

In that same vein, the plot is thankfully simple, since it doesn't become too bogged down in the chronological mechanics, but also simplistically formulaic. The older Adam has traveled back in time to find out what happened to his wife Laura (Zoe Saldaña) on time jump from which she never returned. Meanwhile, Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener), who was the business partner of Adam's father in the past and controls the business of time traveling in 2050, is trying to stop Adam from discovering how she became so powerful in the first place.

Action sequences interrupt the story often, which eventually starts to feel as if the screenwriters are spinning the plot's wheels. Some clever gadgets and time-jumping jets, made possible by decent but mostly functional visual effects (The violent, rainbow-colored explosions of temporally anomalous deaths are a neat, if slightly horrifying, touch), prevent the action from becoming too dull. It is unfortunate that, for all of the imaginative potential within the premise, the climax amounts to more fighting with a big, loud whatsit of a MacGuffin in the background, while the resolution itself is simply anticlimactic.

Such story elements, as well as their routine nature, are to be expected. It's the unexpected emotional core at the heart of The Adam Project that stands out and elevates the material.

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