time travel movie lollapalooza

How 'Project Almanac' Is More Of A 2015 Time Travel Movie Than 'Back To The Future II' Was [Set Visit]

We've all seen time travel, but we've never seen time travel the Michael Bay way. Bay is one of the producers of Project Almanac , a found-footage time travel movie described as Primer meets Chronicle . In the film, time travel is raw, gritty and painful. Bay's time travel is pretty unique, and will be handled by the film's director Dean Israelite .

"I'm South African, so I fly to South Africa all of the time and I'm totally f****d up after a twenty-four hour flight," said the first time director. "And I haven't time travelled. So If I'm f****d up just going on a plane, what are these characters going to feel like when they go back in time?"

He went on to describe how, in Project Almanac , time travel involves weightlessness, electromagnetic fields, and all sorts of environmental craziness. In short, this isn't time travel you're used to seeing in other films that may or many not have been set in this year.

But, to be frank, we didn't see it either. Much of that time travel visualization will be done in post. When we visited the Atlanta, GA set of Project Almanac on July 1, 2013, Israelite was shooting the most important time-travel excursion of the film. In it, a tight-knit group of friends go to the bathroom during school and travel back in time to go Lollapalooza. Girls in bikinis and guys in chain mail, peacock feathers, leis, neon tank tops, beer hats, body paint, rainbow wigs and all the madness you'd expect at a music festival were on set. It was a crazy scene, one that plays a pivotal role in the January 31 film, and a great example of how Project Almanac is doing time travel in a very modern, 2015-ready way.

Below, read more of our  Project Almanac set visit.

The Beginning

Let's travel back to the very beginning. Writers Jason Harry Pagan and Andrew Deutschman had been thinking about doing a time travel movie for a long time, but they didn't just want their movie to go back in history like other movies. They thought "Let's just actually play with the time machine," Deutschman said. "Watch kids try to get back further, and further, and further, and do more damage in their life. And treat time travel as more of a superpower than actually just a place to go to like other movies have."

Once a draft was written, Deutschman used some of his Hollywood connections to get the script to Platinum Dunes. They loved it, developed it for several years before pitching it to Paramount, who also loved it. Much has changed in that time. Originally it wasn't fully designed as a  found-footage film, for example. Plus, the original title was simply "Almanac," suggesting a link to a certain book that plays a big part in another time travel film, Back to the Future Part II . The producers and writers never could have known, when they first encountered the script, the movie would come out in the same year that film was set.

In the film, Project Almanac is the name of the secret project the kids discover that makes time travel possible. The word "almanac" popped up in an online random word generator and a lightbulb went off for the writers. "The movie is fraught with sort of Easter eggs and secrets," said Deutschman. "One of which being that, in our head at least, the original people who started designing the blueprints were fans of time travel movies and decided to name it after something he was a fan of."

"This Is This Generation"

The setup to Project Almanac is this: David ( Jonny Weston ) is a nerdy kid who just got into MIT but can't afford it. On the search for something to help him win a scholarship, he and his sister Christina ( Ginny Gardner ) come upon their dead dad's blueprints for a project called "Almanac." Grabbing his friends Adam ( Allen Evangelista ) and Quinn ( Sam Lerner , above), David builds the machine and begins to test its boundaries. But, as kids tend to do, they take things too far.

That story is told wholly with found footage, a genre that certainly has a bad reputation. Israelite plans on using those conventions against type though. "I think there's a lot of potential in the medium," he said. "In taking it seriously and treating the audience with respect and treating the characters with respect in terms of 'Why is the camera really on? Where would the camera be when it is on?'" In the film, the camera passes between characters, get set on tables, and switches to Go-Pro view a lot.

Producer Brad Fuller also feels the found footage in Project Almanac gives the film a certain immediacy and connection to the younger generation. "I have a 19-year-old and a 16-year-old, there is nothing in my house that is private anymore," the producer said. "This is what these kids do. I mean, my dinner last night is on the Internet. You can go and see it. My son shot it, and it's right there. If Paramount didn't shut it down, my son would be making 500 Vines today. This is this generation. This is why I said I don't have to be cool but Dean is, because that's kind of the way the world is."

"This Is a Pivotal Scene"

That generation-specific feeling was on display while we were on set: day 21 of 28 days of shooting. Project Almanac had taken over a large grass area on a Bowen Property area on the west side of Atlanta. In the film, this scene is part of Lollapalooza. However, during filming, they didn't know which specific music festival they would use. So production designer Maher Ahmad researched all types of major music festivals to create multiple elements that could take place at any of them. There's the "Slippery Soak Supra Slide", a huge VIP tent, porta-potties, an umbrella that shoots down water, festival games, and a few hundred extras wearing badges for the fictional "Signal Field 2014 Music Fest." Very little of this will be seen in the movie, except the water slide, but it gave a great vibe.

The centerpiece of the set, and scene, is a massive blackboard with the phrase "Before the World Ends." There, festival attendees are invited to write about their desires and goals in all these bright, neon colors. It's a massive structure, probably stretching 100 yards long, reaching 8 feet high and it's been entirely filled out by the production. This is where David will first make his move on Jessie ( Sofia Black-D'Elia ) and screw it up, setting forth the events later. You can see a shot from the scene above.

'This is a pivotal scene," Israelite says "The protagonist is about to make his move on the girl and at the very last minute he is too scared to take the bull by the horns. That's been his problem the whole movie. So this is a scene where you feel that these two are finally going to come together and he blows it. It sets up the second half of the movie; about what he will have to do and places he will have to go and the rabbit hole he will have to go down in order to get the girl. All the moral compromises he will make to try and get that. "

Ditching class

After shooting a bunch of close-ups and action on the water slide, the production literally picks up its tents and moves to the other side of the field to shoot in front of the huge blackboard. Two rehearsals are run with Weston and Black-D'Elia (above), one with extras another without, then the master take of the scene takes three takes. These kids are pros.

What really stands out about this is not just the found footage elements and how much Israelite is thinking about the placement and reason for filming. It's also obvious these are kids who have stumbled upon time travel and are using it for dumb, pointless reasons. There's no reason to go back in time to splash around on a water slide, except that they can.

"Our main character has built this time machine with all of his friends, have gone on this journey of awesome stuff, winning the lottery, paying off their houses, just doing great cool shit and they miss this huge music festival," Israelite said. "They didn't have the money for it and now they get the opportunity to ditch class. They are all meant to be in chemistry right now. They ditch class and come to this huge music festival."

"Ghetto version" of time travel

That kind of fun, pointless aspect to time travel reflects itself through out the movie. First of all, they find the Project Almanac schematics but can't afford all of the equipment needed. So they build it from spare parts at Home Depot and their X-Boxes. "They don't have the money or the resources to build the machine that's laid out, so they have to provide their own ghetto version of the time machine," Israelite says. "That's why the time machine has limited power and will only take them back a few days and a few weeks, which I also think is cool about the movie. It's time travel, but you can only go back two days. So it's sort of like this high concept treated in a very low-fi way and so that logic applies to how they are building the machine as well."

This Is 2015 Time Travel

A "high concept" idea and "lo-fi execution" is exactly what the writers, producers, actors and director doing themselves. The movie is a reflection of the production and the story is reflection of the times. With Project Almanac , everyone has set out to make a time travel movie that's relatable yet entertaining and to do that it has to be current and kind of believable. No time travel movie is totally believable, but you at least believe these kids could have done these things with these resources. This is 2015 time travel in 2015, not 2015 time travel in 1989.

Project Almanac opens January 30.

Project Almanac (2015) : Movie Plotholes Ending Explained

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Project Almanac is a 2015 science-fiction time-travel film directed by Dean Israelite. The plot is centered on three guys and two girls who stumble upon a time machine. The actors are good, and they each do a decent job in their roles. However, the characters are constructed in a way that you tend to disconnect with their objectives. This is a time travel movie, which means the rules of the time travel would drive the story. Breaking those rules breaks the story. Without further rambling, here’s the plot analysis and the ending of the film Project Almanac explained, spoilers ahead.

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Oh, and if this article doesn’t answer all of your questions, drop me a comment or an FB chat message, and I’ll get you the answer .  You can find other film explanations using the search option on top of the site.

Here are links to the key aspects of the movie:

• – Plot Explanation
• – The Time Machine
• – Time Travel: Trial On Toy Car
• – Time Travel : Self Trials
• – Plot Hole 1: Revisits to the past
• – Plot Hole 2: Clarity on the plane crash
• – Plot Hole 3: No ripple-effect for Jessie
• – Plot Hole 4: Only the camera stays
• – Plot Hole 5: The Flicker Logic
• – Plot Hole 6: The camera footage in the end
• – Ending Explained

Project Almanac: Plot Explanation

Let’s start from top. David and Christina are siblings. Their two friends Adam and Quinn are helping David make a video to get an admit into MIT. They are all geeks but the sister isn’t and she’s hot. She makes statements like “English Please” in conversations that are slightly science oriented. She gets to hold the camera for many parts in the movie. (yeah it’s one of those annoying hand-held-see-the-whole-film-through-the-eyes-of-the-camera type movies). Not stereotypical at all.

When David doesn’t get a scholarship, his mom decides to sell the frikkin’ house because, you know, if it’s not MIT then it’s off to a 3rd world country to beg at the signals. But David decides to check the basement out for any tech stuff that his dad may have partially worked on before he died. Oh yeah, David’s dad is dead and has been since his 7th birthday.

When David and Christina are looking they find an old video camera. As they start to play it they see a recording of David’s 7th birthday party. My super-smart phone’s battery barely lasts a whole day when fully charged and sitting on a table. This video camera has been lying in a basement for 10 bloody years and it simply starts playing when turned on. Could I have those batteries please, I’d like to use it to solve the world’s energy crisis in general.

The Time Machine

They watch the video to notice that David in his current age, look and clothes is in the video of this 7th birthday. The 4 of them begin to search the basement for more dope and they find a hidden compartment with a strange device left by David’s dad. They begin to read the notes to understand that it’s a time machine.

So they begin constructing the time machine. At school, David’s bag gets accidentally swapped with Jessie’s, the 5th member of the group to form and the 2nd eye candy. David returns her bag and mumbles a conversation with her and leaves.

Time Travel: Trial On Toy Car

When the group of 4 need more battery power, they decide to get Jessie’s car into their parking and connect it to the time device. Jessie who is there in the area to attend a party across the road is more than happy to park at David’s. They connect the car to the time travel device with a calculated risk that the car could explode. Yes, explode. But instead the time travel machine appears to begin working. Jessie joins the gang in the basement and watches their first test object – a toy car with a camera being sent back in time. This blows the fuse to the whole neighborhood. The toy car is found fused with the wall, when they play back the camera on the car they see the events of two hours prior recorded on it. Looks like the time travel caused the camera to sit there and record two hours before they sent it back in time. Since it was way up on the wall, they didn’t notice it. Fair enough. This part makes sense. This proves to them that time travel works.

Time Travel : Self Trials

Then, Jessie, who knows squat about time travel or advanced science in general, suggests that the next obvious move is to test it on themselves. Girl, that car went back in time and fused itself with a wall. Do you understand how pretty you would continue to look if one half of you was fused with a bathtub? But that doesn’t seem to affect our 5 friends. They try it on themselves. They go back 24hrs. Being the morons that they are, the first thing they do is go to Quinn’s house, find the sleeping Quinn from that timeline and draw a smiley on the sleeping Quinn’s neck. They have a blast doing this. Seriously? These guys can invent the time machine and the very first thing they do is endanger their existence? As one would expect the sleeping Quinn wakes up and starts spazzing along with the time traveller Quinn and flickers out of existence. The group breaks the Quinn’s eye contact and leave. They are happy that they are now in yesterday. Before they can head back a dog joins them back to their original timeline. When they get back, they see posters of “Missing Dog” because it jumped a whole day with them and went missing for a 24hr period. No consequence of this though. It is shown to express the butterfly effect on messing with the past.

They next come up with time travel rules. The obvious rule you’d expect is – don’t screw around with the past. But nope, the first rule they agree upon is to never travel in time alone. Yeah they decide that all 5 of them will always go back in time together to screw around with the past. Always using the camera is another rule. By now the viewers’ eyes are crying for mercy, this rule tells your cornea to shut it with the complaining. A few more idiotic, irrelevant rules later they start making changes to their past.

First off, they help themselves win a lottery. They note a winning number and go back in time to buy the ticket. They goof up with the number and win a million plus instead of 300 million. Christina gets her revenge on one of the girls who throws soda on her. What is clearly established so far is – when they travel back in time there are two instances of them. One from the original timeline and the other the time traveller. This makes sense. But when they go back in time to that same point in time a second time, they replace their previous time traveller self.

Project Almanac: Plot Hole 1: Revisits to the past

Repeating time travel to the same time magically removes and replaces the past time travels and their effects. So we’re just going to have to assume that in this type of time travel, the earlier time travel simply gets replaced by the later time travel. This explains how they can keep returning to the Chemistry test, to help Quinn pass, without running into their prior attempts.

The gang then travel back 3 months to the Lollapalooza festival that they missed out on. David gets backstage used passes off ebay before travelling back in time. The gang has a blast. David has a moment with Jessie but blows it by not kissing her. For the sake of bedding a hottie, he breaks the one stupid rule of traveling back in time without the group. He goes back to Lollapalooza and this time around kisses Jessie. Here too his second trip back in time replaces himself from the first trip back in time.

When he returns, Jessie is in a towel in his house, they are now seeing each other. The gang lives happily for a short while and becomes famous too. However they now realize that there has been a plane crash killing a whole bunch of people. They also start seeing news about a bunch of other accidents and calamities that they don’t remember from their original timeline. They start suggesting that the reason this has happened is because of their trip to Lollapalooza. David doesn’t agree with them because he will lose Jessie if they undo the Lollapalooza trip.

The pilot of the plane was the star basketball player’s dad. Somehow the time travel may have caused the basketball player to meet with the accident that results in him breaking his leg. This causes the team to not make the finals. Given many don’t attend the finals, that gives rise to certain catastrophes. Including, the star basketball player’s dad flying the plane instead of watching the finals and eventually causing the plane to crash.

Project Almanac: Plot Hole 2: Clarity on the plane crash

After some thinking David figures out what changed the events to lead to the plane crash. That it was his fault. He tells Adam that he jumped alone and that caused it. What does David do right after? He jumps to the night of the blackout they cause by sending the toy car back 2 hours. There he runs and leaps at the star basketball player getting him away from the car that would have otherwise hit him. People start cheering and David gets back. This event of the blackout has nothing to do with Lollapalooza. This involved the whole gang. David makes no sense talking about him jumping back in time alone causing the plane crash. He didn’t have to travel back alone at all. It was the whole gang’s fault and has nothing to do with the festival 3 months ago.

When David returns, the events of the plane crash and other calamities seem to be reverted back. Everyone is fine except that Adam is now critical in the hospital. They don’t know what actually causes it. Looks like this is another butterfly effect that saving the basketball player has caused. David has no clue how to undo the last one with Adam’s fate. He tries to calculate the string of events and decides he’s going back to Tuesday, presumably the day of the basketball game. This time Jessie intercepts him and enters the warp and travels back with David. David admits that he has been jumping alone and that he also jumped back to Lollapalooza another time to kiss Jessie. While Jessie starts to get mad she also runs into her past self and flickers and gets erased from existence.

David realizes that he has messed too many things up and now needs to go all the way back and destroy the time machine. David tells Quinn his plans while the cops are out looking for him.

Project Almanac: Plot Hole 3: No ripple-effect for Jessie

The cops are looking for David as he’s Jessie’s (who is now missing) boyfriend. Again if Jessie went missing before their first experiment with the toy car, she should have never met David and the group and travelled in time with them. Jessie can’t have gone back with the group to Lollapalooza and therefore never became David’s girlfriend. Yet somehow, the cops are looking for David.

David, who has run out of fuel for a time travel back, breaks into the school and fuels up and jumps all the way back to his 7th birthday. Here he ends up being in the mirror reflection which is captured by the video camera which is filming the birthday party. This is the same video camera that David and Christina find in the basement. David confronts his dad and explains to him why the time machine is a bad idea. After his dad leaves, he collects all the blueprints, the time device and burns it. This causes David to flicker out from that timeline.

Project Almanac: Plot Hole 4: Only the camera stays

If David destroys the time machine in the past, he creates an alternate universe where the group never finds the time device. This means they don’t travel in time and as a result David in the basement of the house on his 7th birthday disappears. Fair enough (ignoring the grandfather paradox). But his bag and his own camera should have disappeared too. After all he brought them back with him though time. Somehow the camera alone decides to stay.

Now back in the future, the film goes back to the scene where David and Christina find the old camera. While Christina finds the camera with the birthday party, David finds the camera his alternate time-travelling-self leaves as he flickers out of existence.

Project Almanac: Plot Hole 5: The Flicker Logic

Why is it that when two instances of the same person see each other, they flicker and disappear from existence while two cameras that find themselves next to each other don’t give a damn? Does it happen only to people? Monkeys are good or do they get messed up too? We will never know because the flickering thingy doesn’t make any sense anyways.

Project Almanac: Plot Hole 6: The camera footage in the end

David plays the content of this second camera and we can hear the conversations from the alternate timeline – the conversation where David and Christina find only one camera. Let’s jump back to that scene when they find the camera and play the birthday footage. Those scenes are captured by a whole other camera that Christina owns, it is not captured in their dad’s old camera. Recollect that Christina has been shooting the MIT prep footage right from the beginning. Let’s call that camera Christina’s camera (perhaps her phone). Using that camera she films the footage in the basement where they find Christina’s dad’s camera. She switches to using Christina’s dad’s camera after that for the remaining movie. The dad’s camera gets left behind by the flickering-out David. It could never have the footage of them finding the camera. That would be in Christina’s camera. Yet the dad’s camera magically plays a footage that it never shot. In fact, the camera magically plays a footage of itself being found.

Project Almanac Ending Explained

The premise now is that the gang has seen the entire footage in Christina’s dad’s camera. They are now aware of the various inventions and travels through time. David walks up to Jessie to return her bag and instead of mumbling, begins to say Jessie’s lines (because that is not creepy at all). After this he tells her that they are about to change the world. Some people basically never learn.

In all, the movie stopped caring about any of the paradoxical effects of time travel. The stupid camera shots makes your eye power increase and the consistency in the number of cameras are also ignored. While the movie starts of promisingly, it simply spirals from one flaw into another all the way down to the core where it pretty much self-destructs. Sigh.

This is how a time travel film should be made. Your mind will be blown. Click below to read the explanation of Predestination:

Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products. His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. He’s regularly available for a chat conversation on his website and consults on storyboarding from time to time. Click to browse all his film articles

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Film Review: ‘Project Almanac’

A time-travel premise goes nowhere fast in this latest take on the increasingly tired found-footage genre.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Let’s say you discover a time machine in your basement. Would you use it to go back and stop Hitler, or would you instead make tiny jumps to tweak the quality of your own life — like taking your friends to Lollapalooza, or perfecting the all-important kiss you flubbed the first time around? For the teens in the found-footage time-travel movie “ Project Almanac ,” the chance to rewrite history is wasted trying to perfect their high-school experience, which naturally leads to unforeseen consequences — for them, at least, although the aftermath will be plenty familiar to butterfly-effect believers — in a film that squanders its potential.

Nearly five years after Paramount announced its Insurge initiative — a plan to generate 10 pics in the ballpark of $100,000 a year, conceived in the wake of the 2007 microbudget phenom “Paranormal Activity” — the studio has finally unveiled its first title (not counting 2012’s shoestring pickup “The Devil Inside”). But the gameplan changed somewhere along the way: In the end, “Project Almanac” came in on a low-eight-figure budget, despite no stars, limited effects and an eye-crossing “my kid could shoot that” homevideo aesthetic, and the ad costs taken to open it will eat up most of the earnings.

Directed by first-timer Dean Israelite, but branded more by its association with producer Michael Bay , who shepherded under the same shroud of secrecy as with Todd Phillips’ wildly successful “Project X,” the end result fails to deliver that renegade one-off’s sense of novelty or excitement — and will likely fall far short of “X’s” $102 million haul, despite hefty cross-promotion from Par partner MTV.

Popular on Variety

Teen auds already have “Almanac” pegged as a time-travel “Chronicle,” suggesting they’ve been there, done that and are starting to feel the found-footage burnout. Hip to the trend, some creatives have taken to calling this technique “p.o.v. cinema,” given the first-person, selfie-style way audiences are invited to identify with the kids as they document their own adventures. In this case, however, the approach doesn’t feel organic: Sure, modern teens love to film themselves, but these cameras seem to add a layer of distance between the action and the audience. The characters spend too much time worrying about whether they’re capturing the incredible events at hand, rather than allowing themselves to experience things directly, whereas a more traditional approach almost certainly would have felt more immediate.

What “Almanac” does bring to the table is a likable cast of convincing social outcasts, led by the prom-king-worthy Jonny Weston , cast here as nerdy high-school science whiz David Raskin, who desperately hopes to get into MIT. Weston is no more a geek than Logan Lerman was a wallflower (in “Perks” of same), though the young actor plays awkward endearingly enough that we go along. In fact, it would be fair to credit Weston with 90% of the film’s charm, even if his casual relatability later makes it tough to accept the character’s turn to the dark side.

Together with best friends Adam (Allen Evangelista) and Quinn (Sam Lerner), and documented at every step by kid sis Christina (Ginny Gardner), David has an aptitude for invention, but a reckless habit of skipping the safety-test step of the process. While rooting through the attic one day, the siblings stumble across an old videocamera with footage from David’s seventh birthday — footage that, upon closer examination, appears to include a fuzzy glimpse of present-day David in the background. How could this be possible, they wonder, while audiences ask another question entirely: Why is it taking them so long to figure it out?

Eventually, the gang’s curiosity leads them to a trap door in the family’s (astonishingly) untouched basement, where David’s dead dad appears to have stashed a so-called temporal displacement device before his disappearance — a backstory that hints at the possibility of more elaborate twists Jason Harry Pagan and Andrew Deutschman’s script has no intention of exploring. Instead, the film focuses on the minutiae of getting the gizmo to work: trial-and-error attempts involving various power sources, accompanied by such impressive touches as levitating tools and electrostatic side effects (Christina’s hair stands on end, a bulb lights up at David’s touch, etc.).

No one’s more impatient to start time-jumping than David, who sets two ground rules before trying the device on himself. First, the friends will only jump together, and second, they’ll stay within a three-week window, since going any further back risks stranding them in the past for good. Just as they’ve about to leap for the first time, the sexiest girl in school (Sofia Black-D’Elia) stops by the basement and catches the guys scheming, introducing a wild card into their dynamic.

And so the shenanigans begin, as this awkward band of social misfits learns the consequences of time travel on the fly, the most dangerous being what happens when one of them comes into contact with an earlier version of him- or herself (they start to flicker like a glitchy hologram, before canceling each other out altogether). So, what would you do if you had the chance to replay the past? First stop: Win the lottery.

After that, these dull teens run out of ideas pretty fast, apart from a general desire to make themselves more popular at school — which comes with all the cautionary fallout one might expect from an American wish-fulfillment fantasy. Instead of building to a big scheme, David decides to backtrack before things get too far out of hand, and suddenly the movie’s over and the opportunity missed. Evaluated on the concept’s own terms, the script clearly could have used another do-over or two before Israelite and his cast took the plunge.

Reviewed at Paramount Studios, Los Angeles, Jan. 14, 2015. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 106 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount release of an Insurge Pictures presentation, in association with Michael Bay, of a Platinum Dunes production. Produced by Bay, Andrew Form, Brad Fuller. Executive producers, Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec, Vicki Dee Rock.
• Crew: Directed by Dean Israelite. Screenplay, Jason Harry Pagan, Andrew Deutschman. Camera (color, widescreen), Matthew Lloyd; editors, Julian Clarke, Martin Bernfeld; production designer, Maher Ahmad; art director, Austin Gorg; set decorator, David Smith; costume designer, Mary Jane Fort; sound (Dolby Digital/Datasat), Drew Ponder; supervising sound editors, Joe Dzuban, P.K. Hooker; re-recording mixers, Marc Fishman, Dzuban; visual effects supervisor, Marko Forker; visual effects producers, Charlotte Raffi, Karen Czukerberg; visual effects, Method Studios; special effects coordinator, Lee Alan McConnell; stunt coordinator, Anderson Martin; assistant director, James Rip Murray; casting, Denise Chamian.
• With: Jonny Weston, Sofia Black-D'Elia, Sam Lerner, Allen Evangelista, Ginny Gardner.

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Project almanac, common sense media reviewers.

Teen time-travel movie is entertaining; some racy stuff.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Characters establish rules about working together,

The teens mostly use their time-travel abilities f

Time-travel sequences include lots of noise, shout

Teens think and talk about sex frequently, and two

Teens use "s--t" frequently. Also "bitch," "hell,"

Several brands are mentioned or shown: Petco, Twit

Parents need to know that Project Almanac is a "found footage" time-travel movie about teens. They mostly use their technology for selfish reasons, but they do establish rules about teamwork; when those rules are broken, a terrible price is paid. The word "s--t" is used a lot, as are "bitch," "hell," and more…

Positive Messages

Characters establish rules about working together, but one character breaks those rules for selfish reasons and pays a terrible price for it.

Positive Role Models

The teens mostly use their time-travel abilities for selfish reasons -- i.e. to increase their popularity or make their high school existence easier.

Violence & Scariness

Time-travel sequences include lots of noise, shouting, and characters seemingly being tossed about, since they land in various positions on the ground. Some arguing. Teens chased by angry dog. Teens break into a school to steal things. Characters disappear. Teens chased by cops.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Teens think and talk about sex frequently, and two characters have sex (nothing sensitive is seen) and are shown in bed together. The "found footage" sometimes ogles teen girls' bodies. Kissing. A teen girl comes out of the bathroom wearing a towel, then opens it to show a boy her body (out of view). Some innuendo.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Teens use "s--t" frequently. Also "bitch," "hell," "God dang it," "frigging," "idiot."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Several brands are mentioned or shown: Petco, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Coke, Red Bull, etc. The Lollapalooza music festival is shown.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Project Almanac is a "found footage" time-travel movie about teens. They mostly use their technology for selfish reasons, but they do establish rules about teamwork; when those rules are broken, a terrible price is paid. The word "s--t" is used a lot, as are "bitch," "hell," and more. There's tension and chases, but not much true violence -- though the time-travel sequences include some loud noises, yelling, and characters seemingly being flung about (they pick themselves up off the ground after a time jump). The teen characters think about sex a lot; there's some kissing, plenty of innuendo, and ogling of female body parts. Two characters have sex and are intimate in a few scenes (i.e. lying in bed together), though nothing sensitive is shown. Product placement is fairly frequent, with mentions of Petco, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; Red Bull and Coke drinks are shown. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (13)
• Kids say (11)

Based on 13 parent reviews

If you could go back to 2015?

A good idea for a movie but not well made, what's the story.

David Raskin ( Jonny Weston ) is a brilliant teen, an inventor like his late father. He gets into MIT, but his meager scholarship doesn't cover much, so he starts looking through his father's notes for something he can use. David stumbles upon a time machine his father nearly invented; after lots of trial and error, he and his pals finish it up and take it for a spin, using it to pass tests and win the lottery. But when David goes back alone to re-do a failed kiss with the prettiest girl in school (Sofia Black-D'Elia), he creates a ripple affect that must be repaired, and each trip only results in more catastrophe. In the end, drastic steps must be taken.

Is It Any Good?

The movie fails to go very deep, and it ignores several interesting time-travel possibilities, but it's worth seeing overall. Yet another entry in the "found footage" genre of films, PROJECT ALMANAC -- like so many others -- isn't really helped by the conceit of having its characters filming everything that happens to them. It's fine to film an experiment, but the idea that the characters would also film the construction of batteries -- or continue filming while running for their lives -- is stretching it a bit thin. (The only reason to not film this story in a more traditional manner is that the "found footage" method is supposedly cheaper and thus more profitable.)

Otherwise, this is an entertaining film with likable characters and fun situations. The characters are appealing, and the romance that brews between the two leads is sweet, while the best friends provide some fun comic support. The visual effects are pretty cool, with rattling, damaging time jumps and plenty of floating, flying objects.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Project Almanac 's sexual content. How frequently do the teen characters think about sex ? How often is it tied to affection or love?

What would you do with the ability to time travel? Do you agree or disagree with what these characters chose?

Why does David choose to make time jumps on his own? Why doesn't he confide in his friends? Why did he break the teamwork pact? Do the consequences seem appropriate?

What's appealing or unappealing about the "found footage" style of movie?

Movie Details

• In theaters : January 30, 2015
• On DVD or streaming : June 9, 2015
• Cast : Jonny Weston , Sam Lerner , Sofia Black-D'Elia
• Director : Dean Israelite
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Paramount Pictures
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : Friendship , High School
• Run time : 106 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : some language and sexual content
• Last updated : May 25, 2023

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The Dissolve

January 30, 2015 Reviews

Project Almanac

By keith phipps.

One detail neatly sums up the entirety of Project Almanac , a found-footage time-travel movie from first-time director Dean Israelite. When a group of high-school friends realizes that, however unlikely it might sound, they might soon be traveling through time, they start to fantasize about what to do with their newfound power. One suggests seeing Biggie and Tupac in concert. The kids never get that far. Their machine, powered in part by a Prius battery and an Xbox 360, has some imposing limitations. But they do wind up traveling a few months back to Lollapalooza and enjoying an Imagine Dragons set. It’s not Biggie or Tupac, but hey, it’ll do. (But it’s definitely not Biggie or Tupac.)

Project Almanac even seems to realize it’s not going to be anyone’s favorite time-travel movie. A clip from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure shows up in the background of one scene, and the characters keep dropping references to other, better movies, like Groundhog Day, The Terminator , and Looper . (And, well, Timecop .) But the film does what it can within some pretty serious limitations. A product of Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes production company, which usually focuses on horror remakes and Purge sequels, Project Almanac tries to make a relatively small budget go a long way, marking a lot of time before it gets to the time-travel business. It at least has a pleasant-enough cast to help with the stalling. Jonny Weston plays David, a budding Reed Richards who, in the opening scene, is getting help from his buddies Quinn (Sam Lerner) and Adam (Allen Evangelista) with a hand-motion-controlled drone designed to secure him a spot at MIT. His sister Christina (Virginia Gardner) films their progress. 

Christina does a lot of filming over the course of Project Almanac , and though it’s become a wearisome complaint that found-footage movies require their characters to film in situations in which they have no reason to be filming, it still applies here. There are scenes where the presence of a camera makes no sense, except that the movie requires it to be there. Yet just when Project Almanac seems to be plunging irretrievably into a morass of camera-jostles and poorly framed compositions, the time machine starts working, and the film starts to be fun for a while. Joined by the popular Jessie (Sofia Black-D’Elia), on whom David has developed a considerable crush, the group sets about making their world better, starting by earning David enough money to go to college (and a little for themselves as well) by playing yesterday’s lottery with today’s knowledge of the winning numbers. When that venture works out even better than they planned, more trips follow, including that journey to Lollapalooza. (Imagine Dragons! Whoo!) But when David realizes he’s missed his chance to win Jessie’s love, he takes one trip back in time too many. Then, almost as if someone had stepped on the wrong butterfly while hunting a dinosaur, the present starts to change into a less-pleasant shape.

The science of Project Almanac doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the sparingly deployed special effects (mostly limited to tools spinning in circles as they float above the time machine) don’t do much to cover up that fact. (The stylistically similar Chronicle , for instance, made its effects count when it needed them to.) Neither does the frenetic camerawork, which just keeps moving even in scenes where there’s no reason for everyone to be hurrying about—like a fast-paced raid on a high-school supply area in which no one is chasing the characters, who would probably be more effective if they just quietly snuck around. But there’s heart to the plot between David and Jessie, and even amid all the science-fiction tech-speak, a scene in which he replays the moment he almost kisses her and wishes he could take a second shot at it taps into real feeling. If Project Almanac didn’t bungle it all with a shrug of an ending, it would be easier to recommend. Maybe someone with a time machine should go back and give the movie a do-over.

GoWatchIt: Buy. Rent. Stream Project Almanac

106 min / Run Time

January 30 2015 / Release Date

Science Fiction / genre

Theatrical Release / format

• Dean Israelite
• Jason Pagan
• Andrew Deutschman
• Jonny Weston
• Sofia Black-D’Elia
• Allen Evangelista
• Ginny Gardner
• Amy Landecker

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Project Almanac and the Rise of Found-Footage Teen Movies

The low-budget, handheld-camera style of filmmaking got its rise in the horror genre, but its growing place in youth-centered movies makes perfect sense.

When Project Almanac' s trailer first surfaced last year, skeptics and gimmick-weary viewers let out something of a collective groan. The Michael Bay-produced teen-driven film lies at the ambitious intersection of the time-travel and found-footage genres: The former boasts a long list of well-loved forbears including Back to the Future , Interstellar , Donnie Darko , Looper, Groundhog Day, Time Cop , and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure , many of which Project Almanac references in the film. Time travel has a kind of universal appeal; it plays on audiences' desires for puzzle-like narrative complexity and what-if fantasies.

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On the other hand, since its mainstream introduction with The Blair Witch Project in 1999, found footage hasn't aged quite as well. Long associated with the horror genre, the descriptor "found footage" is over-used and poorly defined, while the movies to which it's attached are rarely well-executed. The criticisms lobbed at most found-footage films consistently echo those recently, and perhaps fairly, leveled at Project Almanac: chiefly, that the label is an excuse to make a relatively low-budget movie with lazy storytelling, shallow characters, and obnoxiously shaky camera work. Nevertheless, the disjointed and deeply self-conscious nature of the found-footage format works feels surprisingly honest and timely in teen-centered films like this one.

The premise of the film (formerly and awkwardly known as Welcome to Yesterday ) is fairly simple: Nerdy-but-attractive high school genius David Raskin (Jonny Reston) gets into his dream college and wants to make a last-ditch effort to win a scholarship by coming up with a brilliant science experiment. The discovery of a strange home video from David's seventh birthday leads him, his sister Christina (Virginia Gardner), and his friends Adam (Allen Evangelista) and Quinn (Sam Lerner) to find a time machine prototype left behind by David's father, a brilliant scientist who died a decade earlier. After some experimenting, they get the machine to work and go back in time to do various young-people things (win the lottery, go to Lollapalooza), but inadvertently and invariably, they cause a lot of bad, tragic stuff to happen along the way.

From a purely technical and aesthetic standpoint, the found-footage style does almost nothing for the movie, raising more questions than it intends to answer. Like others of its ilk, Project Almanac can't seem to make up its mind about committing to the found-footage approach or not ( Where is the mood-setting music coming from? Why are there multiple POV shots? Why did Christina start obsessively filming way before her brother told her to start documenting everything? ) And for those who watch the trailer, Project Almanac will be a sci-fi film with few surprises. The kids use their "temporal relocation device" for fairly innocuous, expected purposes: to win the validation or love of a super popular/hot classmate, to re-do a chemistry class, to punish a bully, to be seen as cool in the eyes of their high school.

But it's in this context— Project Almanac as an earnest, yet flawed depiction of teen wishes and fears—that the filmmaking approach takes on new significance. The genre dramatizes the identity formation that goes on during the digital technology-glutted adolescent years, which are filled with screens and captured images, whether from smartphones, cameras, vlogging, or pictures on social media. While earlier in the 20th century popular culture more frequently imagined the camera as a voyeuristic tool (see Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window ), the reality of recording has been far more normalized today, even if it hasn't lost its insidious potential. For the most part, characters in films like Project Almanac act like themselves, unfazed by the camera ever-trained on them.

Others, such as The Dissolve 's Scott Tobias , have also noted the distinctly modern appeal of found footage in lending a sense of verisimilitude. But it's a truthfulness that has particular resonance with the teenage experience. In Project Almanac , there isn't just the main, audience-POV camera. There are mirrors, Facebook photos, Instagram videos, many of which capture the teens doing things they don't remember because they happened in an alternate-time universe. The film's found footage approach emphasizes this weird alienation, not as deeply creepy in the way that horror films tend to, but as a fairly normal part of being a digitally connected teen. (To understand this sense of alienation, all you need to do is go to your earliest Facebook posts, or your MySpace, or your LiveJournal).

Teens—already notorious for their self-consciousness and broader concern with social acceptance— face the added anxiety of literally seeing themselves as others see them. This idea of split selves, made more fantastical as when David sees his older self reflected in the mirror at his own seventh birthday party, serves a narrative purpose in a time travel story. Video cameras in effect create two different types of realities: the lived experience of the person being recorded and the image that will be captured for posterity. The filmmaking style inadvertently highlights the role screens play in how David and his friends view themselves as people: uncool, girlfriend-less.

Found-footage films add an extra layer of self-awareness both on the part of the subjects and on the part of the audience. The characters in the recordings know they're being recorded, and the audience knows this too. But for the teens, this is no different than with YouTube videos, or Instagram selfies, or Snapchats. Hence the awkward glance David casts toward the camera as his crush Jessie (Sofia Black D'Elia) inches closer to him. Or when a more transparently performative aspect creeps in to how the characters behave, as when Christina turns to the camera slyly and pulls her shirt off to reveal a bikini top while at Lollapalooza. If much of this feels grating or forced, it's at least comforting to know that there's some truth to it.

Recall found footage's ubiquity in the horror genre, where the original idea is that the people we're watching are no longer around to tell their stories, and all that's left is the recording. Many of these films, Project Almanac included, don't quite go so far as to kill off all their characters, but the recording is meant to serve more as a document, a kind of digital memory, for the teens themselves. In a "pics or it didn't happen" age, where anything that matters should be preserved and shared, this intention is all the more sympathetic. Which perhaps explains the recent spread of found footage to teen movies such as Project X, Chronicle, Earth to Echo, and of course horror films like the atrocious Megan Is Missing or the upcoming Unfriended . The genre may feel worn-out, but found footage seems to have found a new, and natural, home in youth-driven films.

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Review: ‘Project Almanac’ a leap back in time, not forward

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In Hollywood’s seemingly endless quest to use the found-footage gimmick to resuscitate any subgenre, we have the new time-travel movie “Project Almanac.”

The film self-consciously name-drops “Looper,” although it probably has more in common with the comparatively no-frills “Back to the Future.”

Desperate for ideas for a scholarship proposal, incoming Massachusetts Institute of Technology freshman David (Jonny Weston) rummages through his late scientist father’s personal effects in the attic. He uncovers an old home video of his seventh birthday party and catches a glimpse of his present-day self in the footage. That leads him to the garage, where he finds an instructional manual for building a time-machine prototype.

David makes a pact with his sister, Christina (Virginia Gardner), best pals Quinn (Sam Lerner) and Adam (Allen Evangelista), and love interest Jesse (Sofia Black-D’Elia) to travel together in time. For once, characters actually attempt what any of us would do with a time machine: They travel to buy a Powerball ticket with winning numbers they know in advance.

It’s mildly amusing when Quinn repeatedly attempts a quiz à la “Groundhog Day” until he aces it, but it’s downright corny when the kids time-travel frivolously to attend Lollapalooza with VIP badges scored on EBay.

With “Looper” and the fantastic recent release “Predestination” using the same plot device to explore existentialism, the potboiler “Project Almanac” feels like a leap backward.

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The 25 Greatest Time-Travel Movies Ever Made

It must say something, surely, about humans, how often time-travel movies are about returning to the past rather than jumping to the future. As Mark Duplass’s forlorn character says in Safety Not Guaranteed , “The mission has to do with regret.” With all the potential to explore the unknown world of the future, so often when our minds conspire to bend the rules of time it’s instead to rehash the old. It’s compelling to watch a character in a movie do what we cannot — right past wrongs or uncover the reason for or meaning behind the events in their lives, whether they be emotionally catastrophic or merely geopolitically motivated.

So absent is the future from the canon, in fact, that when it is involved, typically future dwellers are leaving their own time to come back to the present. Back to the Future Part II aside, it seems as if there’s something about going forward in time that just doesn’t track for humans. (Of course, you could argue that this is because the present-day concept of bidirectional time travel would infinitely multiply or change beyond recognition any future that may occur, but that’s a knot for another article.)

In any case, the time-travel stories deemed worthy of Hollywood budgets aren’t always straightforward in their mechanics. Some films on this list barely qualify as time-travel movies at all; others could hardly qualify as anything else. There are movies about trips through time but also ones about the bending and fracturing and muddying thereof; then there are those about, as Andy Samberg aptly puts it in Palm Springs , “one of those infinite time-loop situations you might have heard about.” There’s even a movie in which we get only 13 seconds’ worth of time travel, when it functions more like a joke whose punch line hits at the film’s climax.

What these films all do have in common is a fascination with changing the way time works. That being said, the list leaves out movies in larger, more extended franchises in which time meddling is a one-off dalliance thrown into a sequel with little by way of foreshadowing: think Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , Avengers: Endgame , and Men in Black III . (It also leaves off perhaps the Ur-time-travel movie, Primer , and the quite good Midnight in Paris because their directors don’t deserve the column inches.) We’re looking at self-contained stories using time mechanics from the start, with preference given to those that involve themselves more intently with the ins and outs of time travel; that ask questions about time, aging, memory and so forth; and that try to succeed at it in new and interesting ways. So let’s get to it.

25. Galaxy Quest (1999)

Does Galaxy Quest really count as a time-travel movie? Some compelling reasons argue that it doesn’t: Time travel isn’t a major factor in the plot, and the time traveling that does occur is, yes, only a 13-second jump. But its use of time travel is meaningful insofar as the movie itself is a loving spoof of Star Trek , which makes use of time travel in three films ( one of which made this list ), not to mention dozens of episodes across its various TV iterations. Tacking on time travel as a deus ex machina for the actors in a Star Trek– like show pressed into service as an actual space crew by an endangered alien race is the exact right amount of ribbing in a movie that’s as on point as it is hilarious.

Galaxy Quest is available to rent on Amazon .

24. Happy Death Day (2017)

Pick away at the surface of a time-loop movie and you find a horror movie. Most of the entries on this list are covered in enough feel-good spin to land as comedies, but Happy Death Day stares the horror of the time-loop phenomenon right in the face. (It’s also quite funny.) Reliving the same day over and over is an unimaginably potent form of psychological torture, and adding murder to the equation does little to dull that edge. The film follows a college-age protagonist struggling to escape from a masked slasher hell-bent on killing her again and again while she tries to solve the mystery of how she got stuck in a time loop.

Happy Death Day is available to rent on Amazon .

23. Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Seriously, this may be the only good movie in which the film’s whole focus is using a time machine to travel into the future. The fact that it’s a sequel is telling — the characters already traveled into the past in the first movie , and the filmmakers decided to save “traveling even further into the past“ for the third film in the trilogy. Still, Back to the Future Part II is a fun time that makes great use of sight gags and references, recasting scenes from the first film in the distant future year of 2015 with all its hoverboards and self-lacing Nikes.

Back to the Future Part II is available to rent on Amazon .

22. See You Yesterday (2019)

It’s a dirty little secret of time-travel movies that they tend to be, well, pretty white. Tenet ’s Protagonist aside, if Hollywood’s sending someone through time, they’re almost certainly not a Black person, and for obvious reasons: Most of post-contact North American history is deeply unfriendly to people of color, and the problems a person running around out of time and place is going to encounter are deeply compounded if they’ll likely be the target of racist abuse or violence — which makes See You Yesterday all the more compelling. Produced by Spike Lee and featuring one of filmdom’s most famous time travelers in a cameo role, it follows a Black teenage science prodigy who uses a time machine to try to save her brother from being killed by a police officer.

See You Yesterday is streaming on Netflix .

21. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

No offense to the Back to the Future franchise, but time travel never looks more fun on film than it does in the first Bill & Ted movie. It’s a concept that feels distinctly of a different era, so pure is its zaniness, that it’s hard to imagine anyone concocting it today. The titular duo, Californian high-school students in the ’80s, travel through the past looking for historical figures in order to ace a history project, then bring them all back to the present. High jinks ensue! We get Genghis Khan in a sporting-goods store and Mozart on an electric keyboard. What more could you want?

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is streaming on HBO Max .

20. Source Code (2011)

Time-travel-film aficionados know this won’t be Jake Gyllenhaal’s only stop on this list, but no matter. Source Code finds him repeating the same eight minutes over and over as he struggles to find the culprit in a train bombing — with each replay ending in his own death by explosion. For some reason, a romantic subplot is shoehorned into this, along with a bunch of frankly unnecessary technical mumbo-jumbo, but the core idea is a compelling mix of the time-loop movie and the train whodunit that Gyllenhaal is a perfect fit for.

Source Code is available to rent on Amazon .

19. 12 Monkeys (1995)

Some sort of law of nature dictates that every genuinely good idea and/or piece of true art has to at some point be turned into a Hollywood movie. Thank God La Jetée was adapted into something that can stand on its own feet artistically. 12 Monkeys may not retain its source material’s black-and-white look or stripped-down, static-image presentation, but it is a rollicking good time nonetheless. That’s in no small part due to director Terry Gilliam getting the best out of Bruce Willis and a young Brad Pitt, and recasting World War III as a planet-decimating virus. Which, like at least one other movie on this list , “speaks to the present moment,” or whatever.

12 Monkeys is available to rent on Amazon .

18. Run Lola Run (1998)

Unlike almost all of the other films on this list, the terms time travel and time machine don’t show up anywhere in Run Lola Run . Rather, it’s a sort of de facto time-loop scenario in which the protagonist tries repeatedly to pay a ransom to save her boyfriend’s life. In fact, if not for a few key details, it could easily be characterized (and often has been) as an alternate-endings movie rather than a time-travel film. But the fact that Lola seems to be learning from her past attempts with each successive one suggests that she is, indeed, using knowledge gained from previous loops to bring a satisfactory end to this situation.

Run Lola Run is available to rent on Amazon .

17. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

One of the most striking things about Groundhog Day is the mutability and replicability of its core conceit. Perhaps the best case in point is Edge of Tomorrow , sometimes known as Live. Die. Repeat. after its original tagline. It’s the kind of physically grueling movie only an actor as genuinely unhinged as Tom Cruise could pull off. A noncombatant thrust into a war against invading aliens, Cruise’s character finds himself reliving day one of combat over and over, slowly but surely refining his techniques in order to survive the extraterrestrial onslaught. Like the central twosome in the much less violent Palm Springs , he winds up with a partner in (war) crime, teaming up with the similarly time-trapped Emily Blunt, and the explanation for the replay glitch here is actually pretty satisfying.

Edge of Tomorrow is streaming on Fubo TV .

16. Star Trek (2009)

If you could create some sort of an advanced stat to measure controversy generated per unit of interesting filmmaking decisions, J.J. Abrams would have to be near the top in terms of his ability to rig up movie drama from almost nothing. This is a guy whose filmography is like Godzilla rip-off, Spielberg homage, safe reboot of cherished IP, repeat. Star Trek may be his best film, though, a sure-footed reinvention of a dorky sci-fi franchise that made it, well, cool. Somehow, the beauty of Spock and Kirk’s bromance being woven through chance encounters with future selves kind of … works?

Star Trek is available to rent on Amazon .

15. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

There’s a relative dearth of time travel in animated film, which perhaps is a function simply of the fact that it’s less impressive to stage in a world that’s already unreal. If you can Looney Tunes your way through physics, what’s so special about grabbing the flow of time and tying it into a bow? Still, the original Girl Who Leapt Through Time deserves mention here. It’s a beautiful story that interlaces the complexity of time leaping with the intensity of teenage emotion and the thorny process of growing up where the opportunity to redo things leads, over time, to growth — a less shitty Groundhog Day , in a way.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is available to rent on Amazon .

14. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

She may not be the most famous, decorated, or emulated actress of her generation, but Aubrey Plaza is someone whose personality spoke to the irony-soaked 2010s in a way that simply could not be denied. Her character on Parks and Recreation , April Ludgate, was, by all accounts, created specifically to channel Plaza’s real-life personality to the screen, and she plays essentially the same character in Safety Not Guaranteed . Here, she’s a sarcastic intern at a magazine working on a story about a would-be time traveler and using her feminine wiles to slowly gain his trust. The chemistry between Plaza and Mark Duplass is probably the film’s high point; the subplot about the FBI feels like it was clipped out of a bad X-Files episode.

Safety Not Guaranteed is streaming on Tubi .

13. La Jetée (1962)

At only a 28-minute run time, La Jetée is arguably too short to merit inclusion on this list. However, what it lacks in content (and in, well, moving images; it’s almost exclusively a collection of static black-and-white shots set to voice-over), it more than makes up for in inventiveness and influence, and it would be a travesty to leave it out in favor of more recent by-the-book fare. Tracing the tale of a man held prisoner in post-WWIII Paris being used in time-travel experiments as his captors seek to remedy the postapocalyptic state of the world, he’s sent into both the future and the past and ends up unraveling a lifelong personal mystery while he’s at it.

La Jetée is streaming on the Criterion Channel .

12. Planet of the Apes (1968)

Unlike the worse but more straightforwardly time-traveling Tim Burton remake, the relationship between the original Planet of the Apes and time travel is inexact — technically, the astronaut crew that lands on the titular planet does travel forward 2,000 years, but it’s not done via a time machine. The travel isn’t instantaneous: It literally does take them 2,000 years to get there; they’re just unconscious and on life support. Still, the way the film’s ending handles the iconic reveal is exactly in line with the best of the time-travel canon, the telescoping, mise en abyme feeling of the world shifting in front of your very eyes without your moving an inch.

Planet of the Apes is available to rent on Amazon .

11. Groundhog Day (1993)

The famous Bill Murray vehicle essentially invented the infinite-time-loop genre (and it’s hardly a movie that succeeds on the strength of its concept alone), but the idea at its core is so steeped in the casual misogyny of late-’80s and early-’90s cinema that it’s hard to watch today without cringing. Murray’s character employing what amounts to PUA-style techniques over and over and over in a desperate bid to fuck his hapless co-worker just doesn’t hit the way it did back then. If the story arc didn’t present a guy detoxifying himself of the worst aspects of masculinity in order to be worthy of a woman’s love as the primary way for a 20th-century white man to achieve full personhood, this would be much higher on the list.

Groundhog Day is streaming on Starz .

10. Predestination (2014)

This is probably the most complicated film on the list. Following a “temporal agent” (played by Ethan Hawke) who’s trying to prevent a bombing in 1970s New York, it’s based on a Robert A. Heinlein short story and features Shiv Roy herself, Sarah Snook, in a star-making turn as someone with a complicated backstory and a secret. Like the best sci-fi, the film’s premise raises all kinds of fascinating questions about the titular concept and throws in some interesting musings on sex, gender, and the self in the process.

Predestination is streaming on Tubi .

9. Looper (2012)

Wes Anderson gets a lot of flak for his overwrought twee visuals, but Rian Johnson has a knack for making movies that feel and function like dioramas even if they don’t look it. Narratively speaking, everything here is constructed just so — and there’s a certain beauty in that — but who ever had a profound experience of art by looking at a diorama? Looper was probably Johnson’s least precious pre– Star Wars film, which is nice because the temptation to drastically overmaneuver the mechanics of a time-travel story can lead to disaster. The tech used to Bruce Willis–ify Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s face is distracting, and the third act’s retreat from the postapocalyptic city of the future to the postapocalyptic corn farm of the future is a brave choice that the film struggles to land. Still, Johnson’s vision of a future in which organized crime runs time travel is compelling and well worth a watch.

Looper is streaming on Netflix .

8. Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko is a bit of a genre mash-up. Part high-school movie, part sci-fi flick, part bleak meditation on the soullessness of late-’80s America, it’s nevertheless a weirdly successful piece of filmmaking that makes fantastic use of a young Jake Gyllenhaal, a great supporting cast (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Jena Malone, and Patrick Swayze among others), and an absolutely iconic haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” Watching high schoolers navigate parallel universes, wormholes, and time travel is a dicey proposition, but director Richard Kelly makes it work, somehow.

Donnie Darko is streaming on HBO Max .

7. Back to the Future (1984)

While it’s clearly superior to the sequel (and leagues ahead of the final film in the trilogy), the original Back to the Future is a bit of a mess (John Mulaney was right , to be honest). Its racial and gender politics are cringey, and the incest subplot is weird (“It’s your cousin Marvin. Marvin Pornhub . You know that new plot element you’ve been looking for?”), but there’s a clear interest in time travel beyond its shimmering surface: the very real addressing of the “grandfather problem” in time travel via the slow disappearance of Marty from his family photo, the accidental invention of rock music, and a genuine curiosity about the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of time machines. Ahh, what the hell. It’s a romp.

Back to the Future is available to rent on Amazon .

6. Palm Springs (2020)

No offense to Gen-Xers and boomers, but the best time-loop movie of all time is Palm Springs . The film isn’t without its missteps, but it’s much more curious about life than Groundhog Day was through the eyes of Murray’s misanthrope. Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg‘s characters, stuck in the loop together, are a perfect comedic match, and their shared humanity makes for a beautiful arc. The film raises questions about what’s worth doing in life when nothing lasts and how to stay sane when every day is the same. Of course, as a sort of polar opposite of Tenet , it benefited from coming out during the pandemic by speaking, as it does, to the experience of lockdown.

Palm Springs is streaming on Hulu .

5. Tenet (2020)

Interstellar wasn’t enough for Chris Nolan, apparently. Tenet ’s legacy may end up being little more than that of the COVID action movie no one saw — a bloated thriller that Nolan fought to get into theaters and bar from home viewing reportedly to swell the size of his own pockets. It really did suffer from bad timing, though, because this is genuinely a quintessential big-screen popcorn movie whose absurdity is all the more palatable when it’s given the audiovisual bombast it deserves. Ambitious in scope as it traces a war on the past by the future (yes, you read that right), Tenet is as enamored of action tropes as it is in bucking them, and its investment in rendering visible the brain-bendingly knotty mechanics of moving through time is laudable, even when the movie itself remains opaque — as impenetrable as the future, as hazy as the past.

Tenet is streaming on HBO Max .

4. The Terminator (1984)

A partner to Blade Runner in the mid-’80s invention of sci-fi noir, The Terminator is a stunning film in many ways, despite the third act’s now-iffy visual effects. While it’s not James Cameron’s debut, and it would go on to be bested by its sequel , it functions as an incredible showcase for an emerging young director who would exclusively make big stories for the rest of his career. Arnold Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast as the relentless, unemotional killer cyborg sent back from the future to terminate the mother of the eventual resistance leader, and the film’s romantic subplot has just the perfect amount of time-travel-induced cheesiness for it to work.

The Terminator is streaming on Amazon Prime Video .

3. Interstellar (2014)

It’s not inaccurate to say Christopher Nolan is a director who’s more interested in scale and scope than in expressing the minutiae of the human experience in its purest form. But in Interstellar, a Nolan movie in its titular ambitions, there’s a core element of time travel wrought not as sci-fi fireworks but as a paean to the sheer force and will of the power of love. It both does and doesn’t work, depending on your capacity for cheese in space, but even besides that, Nolan’s use of time as story arc — the way Miller’s planet functions, in particular — is conceptually masterful in the best kind of time-travel-movie way.

Interstellar is streaming on Paramount+ .

2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Whereas the franchise’s first movie spends more time on the question of time travel, in the second it takes a bit of a back seat to the action itself. It’s hard to fault director James Cameron for this decision; T2 remains one of the best action movies of the ’90s and — along with Jurassic Park and The Matrix — one of the decade’s best when for special effects. The groundbreaking T-1000 would honestly be enough to get this movie on the list; a tween John Connor grappling with questions of predestination and the fact that he is vicariously responsible for his own conception feel almost like icing on the time-travel cake. Much as in 12 Monkeys , time travel here is mistaken for delusion, as valiant Sarah Connor, in a Cassandra-esque nightmare, has to battle against the future only she knows is coming. Of course, Cassandra never had access to any firepower stored in underground desert arsenals.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is streaming on Netflix .

1. Arrival (2016)

It’s fair to wonder whether Arrival really is, in fact, a time-travel movie. The Ted Chiang short story it’s based on isn’t about time travel per se; rather, it’s an exploration of alternate forms of temporal understanding. The linguist protagonist, played by Amy Adams, doesn’t travel through time so much as come to experience it differently. Still, the plot ends up hinging on foreknowledge that she is granted not via visions but by actually experiencing her future simultaneously with her present and past. For our purposes, though, that’s time fuckery enough to merit inclusion, and boy howdy does the film deliver in overall quality. Partly, that’s simply a question of the source material. Chiang is arguably the most talented (and possibly the most decorated) American sci-fi writer of his generation. But the source story is not especially Hollywood friendly, and director Denis Villeneuve has adopted it lovingly, borrowing a plot device from another of Chiang’s stories, the more straightforwardly time-travel-based “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” in order to add some third-act blockbuster flavor. The result is a beautiful meditation on love, choice, and courage that packs art-film ethos into a genuine sci-fi blockbuster.

Arrival is streaming on Hulu and Paramount+ .

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11 of the best time travel movies to watch on streaming

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Thirty years after their last time travel adventure, Bill and Ted are back in their most excellent journey yet. Bill and Ted Face the Music , starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in their iconic slacker-metalhead roles, is out in theaters and on VOD now.

As a genre, time-travel movies can encompass a lot of different styles. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a silly, fluffy time-jumping adventure, which stands in stark juxtaposition to the hard sci-fi 12 Monkeys or the melancholy, contemplative About Time . What they all have in common is time travel as a major plot point, whether the creators do their best to explain the science or just kind of hand wave. (A time travel movie is different from a time loop movie, though, which is why you won’t find Groundhog Day , Happy Death Day , or Palm Springs — all excellent films — on this list.)

Below, we’ve rounded up 11 of our favorite time travel narratives you can watch on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max right now. Party on, dudes.

If you can stomach a narrative about a viral pandemic knocking out most of humanity, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys is a compelling adaptation of Chris Marker’s legendary short film, La Jetée (which you can stream on Criterion Channel ). The feature remake is mostly notable for its incredible performances — Bruce Willis! Christopher Plummer! An Oscar nomination for Brad Pitt! Willis stars as James Cole, one of the pandemic’s survivors, who’s sent back to 1996 to track down the origins of virus. He overshoots and ends up in 1990, where he’s involuntarily committed to a mental institution. Pitt plays his fellow inmate who, Cole discovers back in the future, may or may not be responsible for the virus.

As far as time travel movies go, 12 Monkeys is firmly in the grim, twist-y, hard sci-fi camp. If that’s your thing, it’s an excellent watch.

12 Monkeys is streaming on HBO Max .

All of the marketing around About Time made it seem like a fun, fluffy rom-com in which Domhnall Gleeson uses his magical time traveling abilities to woo Rachel McAdams. But master of the British rom-com, Richard Curtis ( Love Actually , Bridget Jones’ Diary , Knotting Hill , Four Weddings and a Funeral ), makes About Time a lot deeper. I won’t spoil the twist that throws a wrench into the time travel mechanics, but I’ll just say that it’s more about the anxieties of parenthood than getting a fairy tale ending.

About Time is streaming on Netflix .

Avengers: Endgame

Avengers: Endgame satisfyingly wraps up its core characters arcs and made room for the next chapter while also balancing humor, emotional weight, and huge choreographed set pieces. It also features a surprisingly well executed time travel storyline! If you haven’t seen this one since last summer, dive back into its mind-bending middle act.

Avengers: Endgame is streaming on Disney Plus .

Back to the Future trilogy

The story of Marty McFly’s (Michael J. Fox) travels through time in a souped-up DeLorean, aided by his friend Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), is a classic for good reason. The first movie, in which Marty has to make sure his parents fall in love lest he be erased from existence, is always a hit, but it’s especially fun to revisit Back to the Future Part II just to see what people in 1989 thought 2015 would look like.

Back to the Future , Back to the Future Part II, and Back to the Future Part III are streaming on Netflix .

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure was one of those movies that, if you grew up in the ’90s or early 2000s, you’d catch in bits and pieces because it aired constantly on cable. The format was perfect for that kind of disjointed viewing, since it mostly consists of silly scenes in which Bill and Ted get into historical hijinks strung together to form a tiny thread of narrative. But what Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure lacks in plot, it makes up for in heart. The core ethos of Bill and Ted is “Be excellent to each other,” a philosophy that the boys consistently embody. It’s just nice, okay ?

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is streaming on Starz .

Hot Tub Time Machine

If you’re the type of person who hears a title like Hot Tub Time Machine and thinks, “Ugh, that sounds stupid,” Hot Tub Time Machine is probably not for you. But if you’re the type of person who hears a title like Hot Tub Time Machine and thinks, “Hell yeah, that sounds stupid,” you’re gonna have a good time.

Hot Tub Time Machine is streaming on Hulu with Live TV .

If you only know Rian Johnson from Star Wars: The Last Jedi and/or Knives Out , it’s worth going back through his filmography before he helmed one of the biggest franchises in the world. Looper , his last film before The Last Jedi, stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as two different versions of the same man, a time-traveling assassin, known as a “looper,” named Joe. It’s both a compelling time travel narrative and a slick action movie with neat visual effects. In the wise words of Elijah Wood, long live Rian Johnson .

Looper is streaming on FuboTV .

Safety Not Guaranteed

Before he helmed the Jurassic World franchise, gave us the fascinating flop that is The Book of Henry , and was booted from Star Wars: Episode 9, Colin Trevorrow directed Safety Not Guaranteed. The indie comedy stars Mark Duplass as Kenneth, a paranoid, lonely guy who places a classified ad looking for a partner to join him on a time travel mission. He finds that partner in Darius (Aubrey Plaza) who, unbeknownst to him, is a newspaper intern working on a story about him. Duplass excels at playing these kind of weirdos who live on the border between sad and creepy, and it’s an energy that works well with Plaza’s disaffected schtick. Whether or not Kenneth actually built a working time machine is simultaneously the key to the story and also not really the point, and Trevorrow leaves us hanging until the very end.

Safety Not Guaranteed is streaming on Netflix .

Years before directing his breakout English-language feature Colossal with Anne Hathaway, Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo made this thriller about a man who uses a short-span time travel device to discover the identity of a masked attacker. Small-scale and twisty, Timecrimes revels in disorientation and has the dark comedic edge that has come to devine Vigalondo’s films. A whodunnit for the seasoned time-travel movie-watcher.

Timecrimes is streaming for free on Tubi TV with ads.

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New Lollapalooza Docuseries Will Explore How the Festival ‘Pumped New Life’ Into Live Music Experience

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A three-part documentary series titled Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza is heading to Paramount+ . Michael John Warren will direct the series exploring the festival’s evolution since it first emerged in 1991 as part of founder Perry Ferrell’s farewell tour with Jane’s Addiction.

“When Lolla was launched in 1991, the concert industry felt like a boring car ride that was running out of gas,” Ferrell shared in a statement. “We pumped new life into the live music experience and set the foundation for the youth’s counter culture to become important and exciting again. Now more than three decades young, I am happy to have this opportunity to give people an inside look at the festival’s contribution to music history.”

The original iteration of the festival has boasted headlining performances from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, the Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar, and more.

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Warren comes to Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza having previously directed HBO’s Spring Awakening and the Nicki Minaj documentary My Time Again. It marks the latest festival-centered documentary since a slate of Woodstock ’99 retrospective projects.

MTV Entertainment Studios will produce the three-part docuseries with FunMeter. In a statement, FunMeter’s James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte shared: “This story is the music documentary jackpot for all of us at FunMeter. We love stories where we can pull back the curtain on something you think you know. In many ways it’s over 30 years in the making, with an unbelievable amount of never-before-seen archival.”

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Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza

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In the summer of '91, the Lollapalooza music festival was born. What started as a farewell tour for the band Jane's Addiction, rose from the underground to launch a cultural movement and cha... Read all In the summer of '91, the Lollapalooza music festival was born. What started as a farewell tour for the band Jane's Addiction, rose from the underground to launch a cultural movement and change music forever. In the summer of '91, the Lollapalooza music festival was born. What started as a farewell tour for the band Jane's Addiction, rose from the underground to launch a cultural movement and change music forever.

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