Streaming Spotlight by Cindy Summers
The Adam Project – Netflix
Breeze rating from 1 to 4 palm trees, 4 being best.
In The Adam Project, Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) is a time traveling fighter pilot from 2050 who accidentally lands in 2022 and has to elicit the help of his younger self, 12-year-old Adam (Walker Scobell) to discover what happened to his wife Laura (Zoe Saldana) who was also a pilot he was told died under what he believed to be mysterious circumstances.
While home alone, Young Adam’s dog Hawking alerted him that there was something in the shed. When Young Adam opened the door, he found a man in a flight suit sitting on the floor bleeding from his side while Hawking laid next to him. Young Adam followed the injured man went into the house to tend to the bullet wound on his side, and began to recognize that the man seemed to know things around the house and about him, including his name.
Young Adam noticed that the man was wearing the same watch given to him by his father who passed away and that they shared the same scar on their chin. He realized that the pilot was his future self, which immediately caused him to have a asthma attack. Adam grabbed the inhaler from Young Adam’s pocket and knew exactly what to do, which confirmed the facts even more.
While waiting at the house for his jet and his wound to heal, Adam and Young Adam were confronted by Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener), who was their dad’s original business partner and became head of the time travel division in the future, which Adam fled from when landing in 2022 instead of his intended 2018. Maya sent a team of future soldiers to capture Adam, but to his surprise Laura, who he had been told died, appeared from the woods and aided him in defeating a dozen cyber soldiers.
They all fled to where Laura had been living since 2018, and Laura explained to Adam that she had discovered that Maya had traveled back in time to alter the timeline and insure that she would be head of Sorian and control the time travel division in the future. Adam felt the only one who could help was his father Louis (Mark Ruffalo), who died in 2020, and knew he had to go back to 2018 to fix everything, but Laura had to stay in 2022 as only Adam’s DNA was coded to his jet.
Adam found his father Louis teaching on campus, who quickly accepted that he was his son in the future and both went to his lab to try to prevent the future Maya had altered. Younger Maya showed up at the lab with Maya, who threatened to shoot Young Adam if Adam didn’t give her the hard drive that ran his dad’s invention. Young Adam broke away as Maya fired and hit the core, sending the lab into meltdown and magnetically drawing all the metal, including the cyber soldiers, toward the core, and Maya became her own demise when she fired at Louis, but the magnetic core turned the bullet toward younger Maya and killed her, thus eliminating future Maya as well.
Adam and Young Adam wanted to tell their dad how he was going to die, but Louis refused to let them try to prevent his death as it could change the future fall all of them. Adam and Louis shared a tender goodbye, and all had a group hug before both Adams disappeared back to the future.
The constant witty banter between Reynolds and Scobell is thoroughly entertaining, and Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner (Adam’s mother) also offer strong supporting roles, especially when on the receiving end of Reynolds’ well-known style of wit that is shared seamlessly with Scobell.
Rated: PG-13 (Language|Violence/Action|Suggestive References)
Runtime: 1h 46m
