Having made it through every CGI explosion, glib one-liner and mawkish revelation of Shawn Levy’s The Adam Project (now on Netflix), I feel I owe Moonfall a partial apology.
Roland Emmerich’s bonkers apocalypse picture from earlier this year was an embarrassment on every creative and technical front, but at least it embraced its badness. It seemed, like its self-replicating A.I. lying in wait in the hollow moon, to achieve at least an iota of self-awareness. To put it another way, surely nobody in its crew ever thought they were making a piece of art.
But as lavish science fiction blockbusters go, The Adam Project prefers to have it both ways. Levy refines a bland tone that oscillates between winking humor and rather excruciating sincerity, served up with spectacular cascades of cliché. It’s a film that endeavors, cringingly, to be cool, its characters pre-loaded with trailer-ready retorts from a compendium of sarcastic wisecracks, leaving a paucity of authentic dialogue to be sifted from the dross. It then expects us to follow the narrative, and its manipulative sound cues, to its maudlin core — the emotional estrangement between an adolescent boy and his late father — without earning any of its brazen sentimentality. We’re all, audience and filmmakers alike, better than this.
The Adam Project begins in deep space in 2050, where pilot Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) has borrowed or stolen (depending on who’s relaying the story) a “time jet” that looks awfully like the U.S. military’s purported TR3B aircraft. He’s hurtling through the cosmos, Top Gun-like, with the intent to steer his metallic steed into a wormhole to the year 2018 for reasons that will gradually make themselves clear.
“Time travel exists, you just don’t know it yet,” reads a bit of introductory text. Like a lot of sci-fi fantasies, Levy and his screenwriters have an optimistic view of our scientific frontier, predicting such fissures in the same-time continuum will emerge within just a few decades, when it’s more likely that by 2050, we’ll all be, you know, underwater.
In any case, Adam miscalculates on the time, if not the space, crash-landing in his childhood backyard in 2022 and meeting his 12-year-old self (Walker Scobell), a preternaturally smart but obnoxious twit whom the fortysomething Adam accurately describes as having “a very punchable face.” As a matter of fact, young Adam frequently is the victim of school bullies, having not yet matured into the sinewy physique of Ryan Reynolds. It wouldn’t be a time travel movie if the older Adam didn’t exact some sweet revenge at his schoolyard enemies, and the sequence is as rote and pro forma as you would expect.
But this voyage is about more than confidence building. Adam needs to make it to 2018 to — and stay with me here — meet his father (Mark Ruffalo), a professor and quantum physicist who, much to his own surprise, would go on to invent time travel and have it exploited by a one-dimensional, black-clad, evil industrialist (Catherine Keener, collecting a paycheck), and who himself would be dead within two years. It’ll take both Adams to work in concert with their distant, workaholic father to destroy his invention before it will be used for nefarious ends.
And so we sit back for sequence after sequence of dull, anesthetizing computer-generated spectacle and perfunctory romance, as adult Adam reconnects, in the past, with his wife (Zoe Saldaña). As befits a juvenile creative team, these time-lost lovers slam themselves against walls and rickety doors in efforts to consummate their belated, PG-13 throes of passion.
So many filmmakers have done so much more with so much less. Faced with a bloated turkey like this, you don’t need to be a jaded Gen-Xer to miss the analog charms of Back to the Future or the clever time-travel elements woven into The Terminator, both of which are referenced in The Adam Project’s more meta moments. The genuinely tender and funny About Time is a much superior take on the father-son temporal saga that Levy’s film strains to accommodate, and Richard Curtis achieved it without any special effects.
But hey, what do I know: At the time of this writing, The Adam Project remains the No. 1 streamed movie on Netflix. As for The Power of the Dog, in the week leading up to its projected Oscar victory? It’s nowhere in the top 10. Sigh.
THE ADAM PROJECT. Director: Shawn Levy; Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Walker Scobell, Jennifer Garner, Zoe Saldaña, Mark Ruffalo, Catherine Keener; Distributor: Netflix; Rating: PG-13; Now playing on Netflix