The Adam Project directed by Shawn Levy, starring Ryan Reynolds
released March 11th, 2022
106 minutes, PG-13
After accidentally crash-landing in 2022, time-traveling fighter pilot Adam Reed teams up with his 12-year-old self for a mission to save the future.
Netflix is having a weird hissy fit all over social media and the stock market, so I’m watching as many Netflix originals as I can physically stand. Let’s go babey!
Honestly? This movie is incredible. It’s heartwarming, it’s cute, I haven’t liked Ryan Reynolds’ smug face this much since Detective Pikachu which he wasn’t even really in, Walker Scobell is fantastic and I can’t wait to see him in the Percy Jackson series. The scenery is fantastic, set in the lush PNW, and a good chunk of the story takes place in this weird fantastic split-level house that’s very PNW. The cinematography for fight scenes doesn’t make me feel nauseous! Technobabble that doesn’t make me wanna scream! The weird twin pain of realizing that as a kid, adults should have done right by you but also maybe you should have done right by your adults! The classic eating a picnic on a huge lake in Vancouver and mountains are surrounding you! A heterosexual romance that brings to mind Sappho’s “someone will remember us / even in another time”! Also, people explode into dust when they are killed and it is honestly extremely cool. Zoe Saldana in a cardigan shooting people!
And it’s also about grief, and how every action we take is for the people we love, and silly fighter jet chase scenes and about sometimes you have to rent a hotel room to hang out in because there’s no third space in late capitalism to safely do time travel secret talks. It’s about being a parent, and about having parents, and the weird trauma that comes along with both of those things. Everyone in this movie should go to therapy.
There’s a couple things in this movie that I would be uncomfy watching with my dad – several swears and some sex jokes, but if you’re not a late-sixties man with a purity complex you should be good. And even given that, maybe we’ll watch this one together! It’s a really great movie, pals. And he likes Mark Ruffalo because he was in the Avengers movies; big fan of Bruce Banner in that house.
Shitty things this movie did not need: There’s a super minor subplot about this guy named Christos who has a scarred face (he is also part of the evil squad) and they call him ugly about it. He actually looks quite nice (Hollywood etc) and also can we not do “scarred facial deformities make a person evil” or “evil people have facial deformities” like?? Get a fucking grip. It’s such a boring and uninteresting shortcut to take in a movie that is otherwise very good and very interesting.
Five stars. It’s exclusively on Netflix.
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