Look, I wanted to like this movie, I really did. I like Ryan Reynolds, and Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo are always welcome in anything I watch, but the longer I ruminate on this movie, the less I like it. Full spoilers ahead!
The premise of the movie is this - Adam (Ryan Reynolds) is a fighter jet pilot/time traveler (I think? More on that later) who breaks the rules by going back in time to try to find his wife (Zoe Saldana) who is presumed dead after fudging things up and burning up her time travel jet in the atmosphere when coming back from a jump. Adam ends up at his childhood home and runs into himself as a 12 year old about a year after his dad died in a car accident. His dad is played by Mark Ruffalo - who I love, but I think they couldn't have cast someone who looks less like Ryan Reynolds (or the kid version of him, for that matter). Jennifer Garner plays his mom, and she is also among my top favorite actors, but Jennifer plus Mark will never equal Ryan!
Anyway I think this movie mainly exists because Ryan Reynolds wanted a movie where he got to shit-talk himself, but didn't want to be as self-indulgent as to have a clone or something so they settled on having a kid version of his character. The kid is kind of annoying, but I think he was supposed to be so I can move past it.
Since watching the movie about a week ago, I have been thinking about it and I'm more confused than ever. So Mark Ruffalo and Catherine Keener invented time travel, but in the future no one is supposed to use it, but Ryan Reynolds is part of a team of people trained to time travel... why? Ryan Reynolds was in flight school where he met his future wife. Then they graduated and became... private time travel pilots for Catherine Keener's company? What is the point of any of that if they aren't supposed to time travel? Are they part of some government agency? Is this just like a weird futuristic Amazon where time travel is only supposed to be used to deliver stuff people order immediately? I think maybe I missed something, but then I also think the movie figured the "it's time travel, don't think about it too hard" logic applied to the plot as well.
When watching anything involving time travel, I think the general expectation is that you have to check your critical thinking skills at the door. Otherwise, you might consider how it doesn't really make sense that someone would just dissolve into nothing because their parents never met or what have you. But I do think that, if there are rules set within the logic of the universe in the media, then those rules should be followed. The Adam Project has rules, I guess. They go our of their way multiple times to stress the importance of fate (which is my absolute least favorite time travel trope) and preserving the natural timeline. Usually this presents in media as like world-ending bad, like it will rip the fabric of the universe apart if you go and meet your younger self and give yourself stock tips or whatever. In The Adam Project, however, they hint that it's this kind of bad, except we find out partway into the movie that the timeline already has been changed by Catherine Keener's character whose name I can't remember (she's an evil rich person who funded the research that invented time travel) and no one really noticed. I guess this might be why the future is vaguely compared to the future from The Terminator, although I feel like if there are still billionaires and people are flying jets and stuff, there's no comparison to the shitty world we briefly see in The Terminator, where the human race has been decimated and what's left is forced to live in the sewers.
The idea of fate carries over to the end of the movie - remember how I mentioned Ruffalo's character died about a year or two before the bulk of the events of this movie? Well the two Adams travel back further to before he died so they can get him to... uninvent time travel. To... save the future. Yep. In the in order to do this, they have to destroy some giant MacGuffin in the basement of Catherine Keener's headquarters. In the process of doing that, Catherine accidentally kills her past self and then her future self dissolves away. Like THAT won't have any effect on the timeline?! Also uninventing time travel will also change the timeline since they were living in a future where it existed... whatever I'm losing steam here. The point Team Adam is successful and they for some reason have enough time to have an emotional goodbye and play catch before they disappear back into their respective timelines. They wanted to tell Mark Ruffalo how he died, but he refused and claimed that things had to happen how they were supposed to happen. Young Adam goes back to his timeline and somehow remembers Ryan Reynolds Adam's message to be nicer to his mom. Ryan Reynolds Adam goes back to a future that seems very similar to what his life was going to be anyway since he still meets his future wife. This is all just silly! None of it makes sense, and Ruffalo didn't have to die. If they really wanted to cling to the whole "we can't purposely change the timeline!" thing (even though it seems as though there are NO consequences of doing this on a small scale), then they could have just had the car accident he died in be something relating to Catherine Keener that didn't happen anymore since she's DEAD in this new reality. That way they could have stuck to their ethics of not purposely changing things but while also recognizing that NOT changing things - when you could be making things better - is dumb.
I just find the whole fate/destiny trope in time travel media to be lazy and annoying. If something is really fated to be, it's going to happen anyway, whether or not someone from the future tries to jam things up. That is the whole point of fate or destiny - it is going to happen, no matter what, and can't be altered. So using it as an excuse for stuff that could very easily be fixed is a boring and uninteresting plot choice!!!
So, in conclusion, if you are watching this movie for the 13 Going On 30 reunion, you'll probably be a little disappointed - Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo aren't in it very much, and they only have one scene together. The bulk of the movie is Ryan Reynolds and an annoying kid. If you are watching this hoping it will be a good time travel movie... eh, I don't think it was particularly successful in that regard since nothing really tries to make any sort of sense. If you are watching it for the comedy - tonally, this thing is all over the place, but I guess some of it was funny (Free Guy was much more successful on this front though - watch that instead!). I don't know who this movie is for, but it sure wasn't for me!
So did you watch The Adam Project? What did you think?
[As a little post script, I just, once again, want to give a shout out to the only time travel media that made complete sense - the television series Continuum. If you like science fiction, and you like time travel stuff, and you like the idea of a fish out of water scenario involving a future cop coming back in time to modern day Canada to hunt down time traveling eco-terrorists, then I would suggest checking this show out.]
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