What would you do if you could go back in time? Even better, what would you do if you could go back in time and see your younger self? My guess is many of you would tell your younger selves to buy as many of bitcoin and other cryptos as possible. Some of you even might reveals the secrets of the future and become creators of bitcoin and other crypto projects. Time travel is a fascinating and though provoking topic. Of course it is not real. At least for now. :) It only lives in our imaginations and it has been explored through many angles. Especially, time travel has been imagined and reimagined time and a time again through books and film.
Traveling through time has been one of the special themes in science fiction films. It has gain popularity in the previous century, and continues to be explored in the current films. The Adam Project is a new movie on Netflix, and has just been released. It too takes on a mission of telling a story of time travel. It is not one of the greatest movies I have seen on the topic. I am not too impressed. However, it is still a good entertainment movie. If you don't have anything else to watch on a movie night, might as well watch the Adam Project.
Spoiler Alert: I tend to reveal spoilers in my post about movies and tv shows. If you haven't seen the movie yet, but planning to, please stop reading here.
The story is about Adam. Adam is a pilot from the future, year 2050, where time travel has become a normal thing. Not everything is right in the future. It is not clear what the problem is in the future. I feel like there is more story to be told about this future world of 2050. We don't get to see any of it, except for beginning of the movie when Adam is stealing the time travel capable jet to jump in to the past. Later in the movie we can see that future is advanced in technology through flying jets, fighting robo-soldiers, weapons, etc. But it is till not clear how the future world is like.
Then there is another Adam. Twelve year old Adam from 2022, who lost his father only a year ago, is bullied at school on daily basis. He live with his mother in a house somewhere in the woods like surrounding. They do have a really nice house in the nature. His mother has been grieving the loss of her husband but also trying to keep it together and be strong for Adam, the kid.
For initially unknown adult Adam from the future steals the time travel capable jet and runs away from superiors into the past. Later it is revealed he is on a rescue mission to save his wife, who also is form the future and also travel back in time, for some unknown reason. Adam was trying to get to 2018, the last known time location of his wife. But due to technical malfunctions of the jet it jumps into 2022. He is injured with a bullet wound and end up landing the jet in the woods just near his childhood house.
That's where old and young Adams meet with each other. Conversations between these two are quite funny at times. It becomes obvious to the kid Adam really quick that adult Adam is his future self. Interactions between these two Adams are probably the best parts of the movie. However, the movie tries to tell the story of multiple relationships. Relationship between younger and older Adam and his mother, Adam and father, Adam and his wife. And they try to squeeze in these stories into one mission of saving the future.
Where it fails, in my opinion, is having a smooth transition between these stories and linking them properly so it does seem like they are trying to do a lot at the same time, and leaving some pieces untold. The main theme of the movie is younger and older Adams teaming up to fix the future. To do that they need to travel back in time again to find their father, who turns out to be the one who invented time travel in the first place.
So, they do that. Travel back in time. Find their father. The scene where they meet their father is poorly done. For some reason, the father knows right away who the older Adam is and calls him by name. Af the father has been expecting this day to happen. Other things that don't make sense are somehow Adam's wife finds him in 2022 and shows up right at the moment of fighting and saves them. But then after this reunion, Adam easily decides to leave her to be killed, to travel back in time to see his father and save the future. They could have easily taken Laura, Adam's wife with them to travel back again. They don't. Oh well.
Adams travel back to 2018 to find their father. They are on the mission to save the future. It still not clear what the future problems are, except that their father's partner Maya Sorian, used time travel to change time and make herself more powerful in the future. Ok, so? That doesn't really explain dystopian future. Someone who already had access to time travel in the first place, travels back becomes a little bit more powerful. Life goes on. The movie makes it sound like time travel turned the future into some bad world. But doesn't show how bad things are. That's why it doesn't make sense what was the point of the entire mission. Initially, the mission was a love story, a husband in search for his wife. Then it turned into something else where the initial mission became completely irrelevant.
Another problem I see with this movie is, it hasn't brought anything new about time travel, it failed in reimagining time travel. Even as a science fiction movie, it seems like it borrowed a lot from the previous movies like Star Wars and others. Perhaps all the angels of time travel has been explored already in films, and there is nothing new to imagine. Or perhaps it was just a lazy work of story writers and producers to just take the ideas of the past and reuse them now.
I don't rate movies. I simply categorize them as waste of time, ok to watch, must watch. The Adam Project lands in ok to watch category. Have you seen the movie yet? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.