HOW would you feel seeing your 12-year-old tiny self when it should already be just memory?
Those questions have been explored in many time travel films in the past. In The Adam Project, those questions get to be explored more. Such wonderment cannot just remain within the perspective of our protagonist, who is all grown-up and adult. To complete the inquiry, we could twist the curious lens and be amazed at how a scenario could bring a father to meet up close and personal the son he never saw grow up into his 20s or 30s. As to the other question, we could add a view of the little boy looking up at this handsome guy, all ripped muscles, and admiring not the person but the future that he will be. When the boy grins and asks, “We got all the girls?” and “Did I get laid?”, there lies the newfound power, a tad cute perhaps, of time travel, the various related literature on sci-fi and that magic called Hollywood. Again, that sentence is incomplete: The Adam Project is Hollywood at one of its entertaining best.
With due respect to the wondrous and eye-catching special effects of spaceships unseen unless they are activated by one’s genes, and to warriors who slash through the air as metallic beings—half-shadow and half-laboratory mutation—the most awesome, and I would insist on abusing that much-abused modifier, are the scenes where the young Adam and older Adam meet each other. Those scenes would further bring us to that encounter at the bar, where the older Adam sees his mother (just a lovely, lonely woman who does not recognize him) fondly sharing her experiences with the bartender about her son, who was this Adam who had gone back to a past. Adam inserts himself in the conversation even as he acutely looks at this young mother, insecure and loving him as a child. To find sentiment in that preposterously impossible event—after all, not everyone is into time travel—is the gift of this film.
There are more of these subtly moving encounters between the past and the present beings of the characters that when the narrative goes back to the sci-fi action of the film, I am always caught half-wishing to return to the human aspect of this adventure. This sense or feeling, I attribute to how the plot is unfolding. In the film, the characters soon regain their fondness for each other, meaning the old self and the young self, the one in the other dimension and the one which we are witnessing now. The scientific conflict about how one “evil” being has distorted the technologies of time travel does not matter anymore as we live in this dynamic fiction: memories are no more metaphors than life wishes come true. How would you want to be back in the past so that you could embrace a beloved that has passed on?
Providing magic to this film set in a dystopian 2050 is a cast of characters essayed by actors seemingly born to portray with such aplomb these personas. There are the villains, of course, led by Christine Keener who, as Maya Sorin, also has double moments. As the funder of the time travel technology, she looks to a future that she longs to lead. Keener plays herself simultaneously as the idealistic one by way of a “de-aging” technique and the person dark with ambition in the future. She is the one who runs after Adam Reed, the pilot who steals the time jet and manages to pass through time dimensions. Aiding Sorin is Christos, the Scarface of Dystopia, in the person of Alex Mallari Jr, a Filipino-Canadian.
As the wife of Adam, Zoe Saldaña is Laura Shane, also a time pilot. Stuck in 2018, she will play a great role in the last time jump of our characters.
Without being patronizing, I would want to call the other members of the cast, charming. And it is with them that the artifice of this film rises to pure magic.
We begin with Mark Ruffalo as Louis Reed, Adam’s father. He is the quantum physicist who wrote the algorithm, which is a requisite in manipulating time travel. As a man seen “alive” again, he stands for all the priceless value of time.
Jennifer Garner as Ellie Reed, Adam’s mother, is the fulcrum by which memories both sweet and bitter are balanced. Garner portrays her younger self in 2018, the enchanted time space where she is re-valued by her son, now mature beyond remembering because he is not supposed to be “here” yet.
For the two Adams, we need to equate two wonderful actors: Ryan Reynolds as Adam Reed and Walker Scobell as the young Adam Reed. Between these two are gems of remembrances that one has already and the other yet in the process of creating. Having crash-landed in 2022, Adam/Reynolds meets Adam/Scobell and, in that brief time and space, there is mutual enlistment of each other’s skill—the young, asthmatic, bullied boy discovering for his older, mature edition the magnificent ephemera of childhood.
Ryan Reynolds, it seems, has cornered those characters filled with bravado, glowing imperfections and rakish appeal, which were perfected in another decade by Harrison Ford and, farther back, by Sean Connery.
Psychoanalysis, as when we return to childhood to make sense of our present anguish or unabated happiness, has never had this gracious field day. Forget about physics. Be lost in time, with one hankie at least.
The Adam Project is directed by Shawn Levy from a screenplay written by Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett, and Mark Levin. It streams on Netflix.