Time travel rewind

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, March 11th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: action, adventure, and time travel. Seems like that’s the formula for a winner of a film!

BROWN: Right? Well, it is. But reviewer Collin Garbarino says this new PG-13 film has one very regrettable drawback that makes it unsuitable for family movie night.

COLLIN GARBARINO, REVIEWER: 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 today on Netflix. Skipping a theatrical release used to be a black mark, but The Adam Project is a big-budget action movie that feels like it belongs in a cinema. It’s reminiscent of some beloved sci-fi classics but offers enough originality to keep it entertaining.

Walker Scobell, in his first role, plays Adam Reed, a precocious 12-year-old who’s grieving the death of his father and consequently making life difficult for his mother, played by Jennifer Garner.

Mom: I don’t understand you.

Adam: Dad would.

[Mom sighs.]

Mom: What’s going on, honey? Can you just tell me? If I have to keep leaving work in the middle of the day, I’m gonna lose my job. It’s the third time you’ve been suspended for fighting.

Adam: I know, You’d think I’d be better at it by now.

Ryan Reynolds stars as an older version of Adam—who happens to be a time-traveling Air Force pilot from the year 2050. Old Adam crash lands in 2022 and enlists young Adam to help him complete his mission to fix the time stream.

Old Adam: I don’t know what that is, but when is a flashing red light ever good? Ah-da-da-da-da-da. I know you want to touch all the pretty buttons with your sticky little child fingers, but the reactor has a quantum signature. You fire it up, they can find us. If they’re here.

Young Adam: Who are “they”?

Old Adam: I’m glad that you didn’t ask me that because “they” are classified.

Young Adam: Come on. I already know you’re from the future.

Old Adam: Believe me, I regret that.

It turns out, corporate bullies control time travel. And 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 prevent the invention of time travel.

Old Adam: We can fix it.

Young Adam: By destroying time travel?

Old Adam: That’s right.

Young Adam: And how are you going to do that? What’s your plan?

Old Adam: Well, I’m not going to explain my plan to a 12-year-old nerd with an inhaler—

Young Adam: You don’t have a plan.

Old Adam: —because I do not have a plan. That is correct. But I know somebody who might.

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 about the workings of theoretical physics.

Old Adam: Okay. Okay, the prevailing wisdom is that when I go back to my fixed time, my memories—our memories—they reform, they reconcile. But not while I’m here.

Young Adam: Fixed time? What’s that?

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.

Old Adam: Don’t touch that.

Young Adam: I was just looking.

Old Adam: Don’t touch my stuff.

Young Adam: Is this a lightsaber?

Old Adam: No, it’s not a lightsaber.

Director Shawn Levy uses his special effects budget on fantastic action sequences, but relationships are at the heart of the movie. 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.

Young Adam: I think… I think it’s easier to be angry than it is to be sad. And I guess, when I get older, I forget that there’s a difference.

Old Adam: How’d you get to be so smart?

Young Adam: How’d you get to be so dumb?

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 pervasive language, this funny action-filled movie about grief and familial love could have been enjoyed by parents and kids alike.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

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