"When a bad idea is the only idea, it becomes a great idea."
Ryan Reynolds teams up with director Shawn Levy for a second time in this family sci-fi adventure heavily inspired by 80s films.
Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) arrives in 2022 having time-travelled from the future and finds his 12-year old self (Walker Scobell). Adam is on a mission to find his wife (Zoe Saldana) who went missing in time. It turns out that Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener), leader of the dystopian world in 2050, has used time travel to give herself more power so both versions of Adam must go to 2018 to stop the invention of time travel, with the help of their father Louis (Mark Ruffalo).
Where the film really works is it's sentimentalism. Young Adam is trying to deal with the recent death of his father and relations with his mother (Jennifer Garner) are complicated because of this. Older Adam regrets his actions of this time and tries to fix things whilst he is there. Then both Adam's get an opportunity to see their father one more time which the pair find quite challenging. Mark Ruffalo is excellent as the father and really helps to add some emotion to the scenes his character is in.
The sci-fi unfortunately is quite weak. It's time travel dynamics and rules are pretty complicated and aren't explained especially well. I think if you are going to tell a story with some fairly complicated time travel you have to be able to explain it clearly. It's also a bit odd that the world of 2050 is suggested to be some dystopian nightmare and yet we learn very little about it- I would have liked to see young Adam get a glimpse of this future and return to his own time determined to ensure the future doesn't end up like that.
The action here is a little mixed. A nice sci-fi explanation is given which allows for bad guys to be killed without any gore which works well in a family-friendly film. Unfortunately the writers don't appear to have any ideas for action sequences and we get the same one where Adam is surrounded by bad guys and fights them with a sort of lightsabre about five times. I was also expecting something more exciting in the finale but the build-up leads to a pretty lacklustre conclusion.
It's certainly nice to see an original project like this but actually not a huge amount feels that original because it is so derivative of other works. There's definitely elements of Back to the Future here (the film is even referenced) and the general tone is clearly inspired by Amblin films.
I think that this is probably a great watch for a twelve-year-old but it unfortunately doesn't work on different levels in the way it is trying to. Four writers are credited here which perhaps explains why it feels a bit confused- there's certainly the germ of a great idea here but it doesn't come together as well as it might have.
Comments
Post a Comment