In case you did not notice, the 1980s have recently made a comeback: there is inflation, there is a unity government, and the Russians are the bad guys again. In light of this, it is only natural that the entertainment industry also brings back to life the infamous decade, with more and more works dripping with nostalgia towards it.
Prominent among them is of course “Strange Things”, which will soon return for a fourth season on Netflix, and now the movie “Project Adam” is also coming to the streaming service, directed by Sean Levy, who, by chance or not, also co-created the hit series. It stars Ryan Reynolds, who last summer broke box offices in that May’s release Guy.
“Project Man” corresponds directly with several hits from the 80’s, including “Back to the Future”, one of the characteristic films of that decade. Like him, he also deals with time travel, and presents different versions of the same characters along the axis of the years.
In this case, Reynolds plays the pilot by whom the film is named, who lives somewhere in the future but goes back in time and reaches our day. He meets a version of himself at age 12 and hooks up with him to save his family – but also the entire universe, or something.
It is not fair to compare the film to “Back to the Future” – a perfect classic that sets an unrealistically high standard. But “Project Man” mentions the eighties hit in one of its first dialogues and picks it up, so there is no choice but to make the comparison.
Well: one of the brilliant aspects of “Back to the Future” was the clarity of the plot. Although he dealt with a complex concept like time travel, he did so in a completely flowing way. “Project Man,” on the other hand, turns out to be an impossible nut to crack. One of the scenes takes place in a physics class at the university, and the student tells the lecturer “even after two semesters I will not be able to understand what you are talking about.” The feeling is that the script is referring to itself.
This confused and confusing script is signed by no less than four names. The first of which he wrote the first version about a decade ago, and since then it has gone through being written by three other professionals. As is often the case, these rescue attempts only aggravated the situation, just as attempts to clean a stain sometimes only increase the dirt.
Although the film is called “Project Man”, it is not clear who its protagonist is. Aside from Reynolds, it has a respectable list of stars and stars – Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Garner, Catherine Keener and Zoe Saldana, for example. It’s a team that will not embarrass any blockbuster or Oscar-nominated drama, but it seems that all of these here embody passers-by and not characters. A lot of faces and names are circulating here, but it is not clear what their role in power is and certainly not what their character is.
Apparently the script went through so many incarnations, that it lost its hands and feet. Thus, for example, the protagonist declares that in his childhood he had an unusual character, but that it does not stand the test of reality: his character as a child is not endowed with special qualities, here or there. At first the film seems to focus on the relationship between the little boy and the guest from the future, but this direction is abandoned at some point and arbitrarily.
It is also not clear what the center of gravity of the film is and what its tone is – whether it is a ticking comedy or an action fantasy with a little more weight. Most of all, it is not clear what the producers who insisted on saving the project thought, and what potential they saw in the original idea. To rewrite a script four times in ten years you have to believe in something. The question is what.
To be sure, the performance is also lacking, to say the least. Similar to other star-studded movies that have surfaced on Netflix recently, such as “Red Message” and “Thunder Force”, the effects here are cheap and unconvincing, and if we repeat the parallel we made in their cases, “Project Man” is “Back to the Future” from Ali Express.
But even this time, it probably does not matter to Netflix. The streaming service withdrew sponsorship of the project after Paramount Studios gave it up, and it is likely to fit their business model. After all, thanks to the stars he plays and the movies he imitates, the algorithm will know how to push it effectively.
And what next? While it is hardly possible to get through the “Human Project” to the end, it does not matter either. After all, Netflix, like any other platform nowadays, is generous when it comes to what they count as “viewing.” Even if you stop in the middle, or just start squinting towards the phone early, it will still count, allowing the film to screw high in the rating charts.
“Back to the Future,” the imitation object of this shabby film, did not need such tricks. The inevitable comparison between them once again illustrates a sad fact: we are not reliving the 1980s themselves, but a distorted version of them.
Avner Shavit is the film critic of Walla!
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