Isn’t the level of danger kids in ’80s movies got to face amazing? These children on their bikes, communicating via walkie talkies and landlines, discovering massive treasure, dealing with Russian invasions, protecting aliens, holding the future of entire galaxies and timelines in their adolescent hands. To enjoy these movies, you had to throw out questions of plausibility and go along for the ride. The original movies, a good number on Netflix, as well as a surge of new movies clearly inspired by the nostalgia, show how much love and interest there is in this kind of content. 

Couple this with the popularity of so much sci-fi content on the platform and it’s no surprise that a movie like The ADAM Project would come along. Big-name stars, most of them having played superheroes (though I guess at this point, which A-lister hasn’t?), come together in a story about time-traveling heroics. You know what’s surprising? It’s not that this movie is entertaining. That’s sort of a bare minimum expectation, which it exceeds. What is surprising is how effective it is on an emotional level, taking the big action sequences and crazy timey-wimey story pieces to craft a coming-of-multiple-ages narrative. 

I opened this review talking about ’80s movies, but thankfully, this movie isn’t a period piece. The time-traveler Adam, played by Ryan Reynolds, pursued by villains led by Catherine Keener as Maya Sorian, are from 2050. Reynolds jumps back in time to team up with his adolescent self in 2021, played by Walker Scobell. Props to Scobell here, who nails playing a young Reynolds, as well as getting that ’80s kid hero feel. He toes the line of obnoxious, while also expressing a lot of depth beneath the quipping. 

Broken down as a pitch, the movie’s story is pretty simple. Things have gone wrong in the future and Adam has traveled into the past to try and fix things. That winds up involving teaming up with his younger self. Also involved in the story are Adam’s mother, Jennifer Garner, his father, Mark Ruffalo, and the woman who would be Adam’s wife, played by Zoe Saldana. All these actors turn in great performances, managing to do a lot of character work in small pockets of time. 

I know that the nerds among us would’ve immediately doubted the premise of teaming up with your younger self. Doc Brown said that if you saw yourself it would destroy the universe. But the movie explains this away. In fact it manages to set up a lot of ideas and deploy enough of the various concepts in play for it to make “just enough” sense without going too deep in. I’m okay with that, because it shows that the filmmakers took the time to think about how much the audience needs to know to go along with the concept, so that once we buy in, then it’s off to the races and they can do whatever else they want creatively. 

What I appreciate here though is that the creative direction that director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things, Night at the Museum) pursues here is to delve into the emotions underpinning Adam’s adventure. Sure, he is going back in time to save the world. But tied to that world-saving is an extraordinary amount of trauma. The film pursues the confrontation of trauma with the same energy it does a big action sequence. 

That’s a big thing to like here. At this point, big action sequences are…par for the course? Boring? Like, if you have enough budget, you’ll get to do some big, extraordinary set pieces. And even bad or boring movies can manage to have good action scenes. This isn’t to say that the action set pieces here aren’t good. In fact, they are really entertaining. 

What the ’80s movies did so well, and what I think this movie takes their lead from, is that there is a real, true  emotional trauma that characters are confronting alongside the big crazy adventure they are taking. The top-of-mind example of course is E.T., where Elliot was dealing with his parents’ divorce. 

In The Adam Project it’s doubly painful because we have two versions of the same character, revisiting and confronting the same trauma from different points. Whether younger or older Adam, he is a character dealing with loss and abandonment. One of the movie’s strengths is tying together these issues across iterations of the character and tethering them to the need to fix the timeline.

This is balanced out against the fact that there’s always a touch of wish fulfillment in these kinds of adventures. Going on an adventure itself is part of that, but here, we see young Adam getting to see a badass older version of himself. That’s definitely cool. 

Though it’s at this point in thinking about the movie that I move from critical to personal, because this movie hit so many emotional switches for me. It’s marketed as a family flick, targeted as something for both kids and their parents. But man, this thing broke through to me as a curmudgeonly middle-aged man in a way that I was not prepared for. Reynolds, often thought of for his pranking, trolling, and willingness to do silly things, hits some incredibly deep notes here. The wish fulfillment isn’t only in having the chance to save the world, but to say things to your younger self that you probably needed to hear, or to talk to your parents as an adult yourself. 

Which is to say that when I was watching The Adam Project, I was getting a high-energy kiddie adventure movie mixed with a surprise therapy session that was digging up things I was not prepared to have dug up! 

Among the recent Netflix genre flicks as well as ’80s nostalgia/revivalists, this one’s definitely a standout. And at risk of spoiling things, one of the best things about it is that it seeks to tell a fully formed and self-contained story from beginning to end. No setting up for franchises and spin-offs. Instead, like some of the great ’80s movies it’s built on, it is something that can be rewatched, something that can be enjoyed through multiple viewings. – Rappler.com