When David Raskins was seven years old, he lost his father in a tragic car accident. David doesn’t remember much about his dad, other than he was a brilliant scientist, and he loved his only son. Now, as a senior in high school, he’s quickly following in his father’s footsteps, as he, too, takes on the challenges of being an inventor. When David finds out that the project that he, his sister Christina, and his friends Quinn and Adam have been slaving away on for the past several weeks has only granted him a partial scholarship to MIT, naturally, David is devastated. His mom plans to sell their house and move into an apartment with his sister to come up with the other $40,000 they’ll need to send David to college, but David knows there must be another way. Like an answer to his prayers, clues start popping up in his home that lead him down to the basement, where his dad worked on his creations so many years ago. It turns out that his father had constructed a time machine, which if proven effective, could be the meal ticket David’s been looking for to grant him a full scholarship, and allow his family to keep their home, all at the same time.

At first, it seems like the time machine is the best thing that’s ever happened to this band of outsiders. David has been lusting after Jessie, one of the most popular girls in school, for as long as he can remember, but could never find the courage to approach her. However, once she becomes entangled in this secret “jumping” scenario, their relationship grows, and soon, blossoms into love. The group calls it their “second chance machine”, as it allows them to fix all of the problems of their lives with ease. Quinn failed his chemistry test, but with the help of the machine, he’s able to re-live his test over and over until he aces it, successfully advancing him out of the twelfth grade, and onto the next step of education. David’s little sister is being bullied at school, but with one quick jump to the past, she’s able to bring out her claws, and surprise the school bully with her own act of malice. It seems that the machine can’t steer them wrong, until the freak accidents begin to occur. Planes crashing, bones breaking, people disappearing — it can all be attributed to the ripples these kids are causing. However, cleaning up the messes that these quick fixes have created means erasing everything good that has come into their lives as a result of changing the past. Soon, David will have to decide between the perfect life he’s created for himself, and the rest of the world he’s destroying in the process.

Undoubtedly, the most innovative and intriguing aspect of Project Almanac is its use of found footage in a time travel movie. In the past, with films like Groundhog Day, Back to the Future and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the audience was only able to experience time travel from a third person perspective. Now, viewers can see first hand what it’s like to jump through time, as David and his sister film every moment of their adventures with a handheld camera, from their time at Lollapalooza, to actually seeing themselves in the flesh a few days prior. It’s a unique concept that gives an inside look into traveling to the past, and gives a better understanding as to how a person can spend hours in the past, while only wasting a few precious seconds of time in the present. If only they had spent the time in the past on more meaningful events than scamming the lottery so they can pay dozens of food trucks to cater to the kids at their school.

Sadly, other than the new first person perspective on temporal relocation, Project Almanac offers little in the originality department. The truth is, we’ve all seen this movie before, only it was starring Ashton Kutcher, dealt with a much darker subject matter, and used notebooks to travel to the past instead of a time machine. Project Almanac plays like a birth child of The Butterfly Effect and Chronicle, recycling the same storyline and camera angles as its predecessors, and offering up sub-par acting and loud house music in return. However, since it’s clearly geared towards a younger audience, it will probably get away with its copy-catting quite easily, since most teenagers only know Kutcher as the Punk’d guy, and will be too distracted by the half-naked dancing girls at the music festival and pompous attitudes screaming out from the screen to think that this film is anything but “totally awesome”. In a way, the most successful facet of this film is that it waited an appropriately long ten years after Kutcher’s attempt at the dramatics to be released to audiences that were born in the 1990s.

Overall, Project Almanac is a fun, light-hearted movie that at least uses found footage to capture time travel in a way that hasn’t been done to death. In all honesty, it’s probably the most successful time travel film that’s been released in years, even if like many that have come before it, it fails to accurately describe time travel, breaking some of its own rules in the latter part of the film that it set in the opening premise. The final act is messy and contradicts its own guidelines, but if you ignore logic and films of the past, it makes for a pretty entertaining little movie that teens will definitely love. Unfortunately, this writer is too old and experienced to find it anything but one big trip to the past, specifically, 2004.