A tale of two Adams

Last summer director Shawn Levy and actor Ryan Reynolds gave audiences a surprise hit with their video-game action film Free Guy, and they’ve collaborated again on The Adam Project, a sci-fi time-travel adventure debuting on Netflix. Skipping a theatrical release used to be a black mark, but Netflix continues to defy tradition with this big-budget action movie. It’s reminiscent of some beloved classics but offers enough originality to keep it entertaining.

Adam Reed (Walker Scobell in his first role) is a precocious 12-year-old who’s grieving the death of his father and consequently making life difficult for his mother (Jennifer Garner), but an older version of Adam (Ryan Reynolds)—who happens to be a time-traveling Air Force pilot—arrives from the year 2050.

Old Adam needs young Adam to help him save his wife (Zoe Saldana) and fix the time stream because the people from the future who control time travel are corrupt corporate bullies. When soldiers from the future arrive to stop old Adam, the two Adams realize that to save the world, they must go further back in time to find their father (Mark Ruffalo), the guy who invented time travel in the first place. Maybe the world would be better off if time travel had never been invented.

The Adam Project might be a time-travel movie, but it doesn’t take its central conceit too seriously. Isn’t one of the basic rules of time travel that you shouldn’t interact with yourself? In this movie, the rules of time travel serve the plot rather than offer a convincing speculation into the workings of theoretical physics. The film doesn’t aspire to be hard-core science fiction with somewhat plausible technology. It’s science fantasy with cool-looking gadgets doing cool-looking things. No one explains why, in the future, time machines are attached to fighter jets or why magnetism only seems to work when it’s convenient. It’s just cool.

Levy uses his special effects budget on fantastic action sequences, but relationships are at the movie’s heart. Both Adams are quick-witted and funny, but both carry scars from pain and loss. Sometimes people think they’d like to go back and give their younger selves some advice to make life easier, but The Adam Project asks viewers to ponder whether our more cynical, older selves might benefit from reexamining our lost youth. It’s like time travel as therapy.

The Adam Project evokes a sense of nostalgia with its callbacks to classics of the 1980s, including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Last Starfighter, and Back to the Future. Nostalgia sells these days, and I thought it was a slick trick to make me feel nostalgic while watching a movie set in 2022. But be warned, like those movies of the 1980s, this PG-13 film has numerous instances of coarse language. It’s a shame, because without the language this funny action-filled movie about grief and familial love could have been enjoyed by parents and kids alike.