Language: English
Less than fifteen minutes into The Adam Project, there’s a Marvel joke. A 38-year-old Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) finds himself having to tell his mind-blown 12-year-old self (Walker Scobell) that time travel exists. The kid, full of geeky questions, inevitably asks: “Is there a multiverse?”. Adam rolls his eyes and tells the 12-year-old to stop watching so many movies. It’s a Reynolds-esque quip, but also one that speaks to the larger identity of The Adam Project – a sci-fi picture that can best be described as the Marvel-ization of time travel. In essence, this means that Shawn Levy’s film is both a parody of the genre and an extension of it at once. It also means that the intimacy of the genre – where characters often go back in time for personal reasons – is sacrificed at the altar of scale.
The treatment is familiar. The tension of the stakes as well as the scientific jargon – the drama as well as the logic – are diffused repeatedly by self-deprecatory humour and wisecracks. If something cannot be explained – and there is a lot that cannot – Reynolds does what Robert Downey Jr. did in the MCU movies. His movie-star image becomes a distraction tactic. He lays on the wit thick and fast, and the film hopes we’re charmed enough to go with the ride rather than question it.
The premise of The Adam Project, too, is basically Iron Man reimagined as a modern time-travel movie: A pilot from the future must undo his visionary father’s work in the past so that the father’s evil business partner is stopped from exploiting the technology and ruling the planet. In other words, humanity before evolution. Of course, the “action-comedy” dictates that the man’s journey is far from smooth: Adam from 2050 ends up accidentally landing up in 2024 instead of 2018, thus faced with the prospect of taming his oversmart 12-year-old self before getting down to business. Together, they must find a way to reach 2018 – while being chased by spiffy corporation villains – and convince their affable dad that his invention needs to be lost in time.
The Adam Project is a difficult film to dislike. It’s fun and frothy; the chemistry between the two Adams is cheeky; little Walter Scobell sounds freakishly old for his age; there’s also Mark Ruffalo, the father of Adam (which I’m sure is some kind of biblical in-joke), and an actor who single-handedly elevates the moral integrity of big-budget Hollywood flicks. But this begs the question: Is entertainment enough? Is the hybrid of self-awareness and spectacle enough? The truth is that a Marvel do-over often amputates the spirit of the story. The thing about time travel is that it’s an inherently adult concept.
The need to commute across time to repair or restore an equation is often rooted in a feeling of loss and regret. It is the cinematic version of crafting your own second chance. So when it’s packaged as young and family-friendly entertainment, the gravity of being human tends to get trivialised.
I’m not saying such films need to be brooding and dark, but the body – the pace, the gizmos, the chases, the colour – need not overwhelm the soul. The Anne Hathaway segment (“Leah”) of the Amazon anthology Solos is a perfect example: At one point, we see three Hathaways arguing with each other, but the result is still a profound portrait of love and caregiving. Full-length features feel the urge to be more diverse with their tone, but the driving force needs to be private.
The Adam Project initially hinges on Adam’s mission to go back in time to rescue his late wife, Laura (Zoe Saldana), from dying in the future. Needless to say, I’m a sucker for fate-altering love stories – the sight of a grief-stricken Superman zipping around the earth to reverse its rotation cycle and un-kill Louis Lane still remains etched in my memory. You can sense that Adam’s grief has grizzled a bit – he wants her back badly, he is hurting, but his caustic personality stays intact. Without warning, the stakes are soon inflated, and it becomes about saving mankind in general. I get the reasoning. By being bigger than him, the narrative forces Adam to be a superhero rather than a romantic hero: he must choose to save the planet from Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener) at the risk of undoing his entire marriage. (You get a sense that a chaotic world-is-ending movie is simultaneously unfolding in 2050, which we fortunately don’t see). True soulmates will find each other in any dimension, it is implied. I like the thought very much, but I’m not convinced about the embellishments. I found myself tuning out during the video-game-style action sequences and the awkward climactic set piece in a giant laboratory. Not to mention the stretched Sorian scenes, which seem to have a massive Obadiah Stane hangover.
Instead, some of the film’s nicer moments are quiet: Older Adam speaking to his mother (Jennifer Garner) at a bar through the lens of hindsight and guilt, the two Adams seeing their father in 2018, older Adam consistently advising his 12-year-old self to be nicer to his mother. The action and noise felt like placeholders in what is effectively an Inside-Out-style adventure about the extensive universes that lie behind the simplest of gestures. For instance, a child decides to hug his mother before leaving for school – all it took was a thrilling journey back in time with his older self to meet his dad one last time and save the world, which is sort of a fantasy metaphor for a psychological coming-of-age journey for a kid who’s just lost a parent. (Think Joy and Sadness going through an adventure before taking back control of the Mind console). Or a young woman instantly liking the sarcastic man sitting next to her during a training session – all he had to do was change the entire course of history to arrive at this moment. Even the video-game-style action can be rationalized if you take into account that little Adam is a gaming nerd, glued to his screen, leading his imagination to be very 16-bit-like – not to mention the theme of Free Guy, Shawn Levy’s last film starring Reynolds.
But there’s no escaping the fact that The Adam Project is too shy to be serious. I make the plot sound deeper than it really is, because the writing lacks the confidence to reveal its heart. The few times it does, poignant lines like “it’s easier to be angry than to be sad” and “it’s easier to hate him than to miss him” convey the language of what should have been an emotionally intelligent – as opposed to smarter – film. But like that brash high-school boy who hides his affection for a girl by relentlessly teasing her, the film keeps betraying its maturity by reneging on its own identity.
If The Adam Project were a person, it would be all but forgotten in 2050 before traveling back in time to change the way it was conceived. That would involve going further back in time to stop the first Marvel movie from getting made, which in turn would ensure that The Adam Project becomes a small indie tragicomedy about the perils of growing up in a dysfunctional family. Maybe it would win at Sundance, too. For now, Ryan Reynolds being Ryan Reynolds being Deadpool with the future of humanity at stake is a project as old as time.
Rahul Desai is a film critic and programmer, who spends his spare time travelling to all the places from the movies he writes about.
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