Dhen tin soldiers fight battles and dinosaur skeletons play tag in the museum at night, we only know of Shawn Levy, the Canadian-American director, who is otherwise known for not being too good at slapstick (this time, for example, a gunshot wound makes strange noises: “That is weird: It farts when I cough”). If Ben Stiller hadn’t worked in the New York Museum of Natural History, but in a film museum, and there every night superheroes jumped out of their stripes to twist their “storylines” into noisy new adventures with an almost obscenely good mood, then he would have something like the reactor core of this director’s creativity. Plots serve as fuel for Levy, narrative cores are fused, as in the past year with the comedy “Free Guy” regarding a non-playable character in a computer game who doesn’t know he is part of an artificial world and promptly falls in love. From the “Truman Show” to the groundhog saga to “Matrix” and “Avatar”, a lot of material from simulation films merged here, which only did not lead to disaster because Ryan Reynolds embodied the protagonist with absolutely rousing euphoria.
There’s little doubt that Levy’s brain is as squiggly blue as the inside of The Adam Project’s “world’s largest electromagnetic accelerator,” so familiar to us because it’s cobbled together from every technoid arcane room of sci-fi tradition. The ensuing lightsaber battle is teeming with Star Wars quotes. It’s Ryan Reynolds once more, here in the role of fighter pilot Adam Reed, who puts his stamp on the new Levy prank – a time travel into the time of time travel – with his powerful presence and possibly electromagnetic humor acceleration. However, the young Walker Scobell also played his part in the irresistible atmosphere of the film, which is characterized by retro nostalgia, quick-witted wit, clever self-mockery and casual situation comedy. He plays the childish version of Adam and engages in sparkling dialogues with his older self (narratively a no brainer for time travel films).
Smarter at twelve
Before meeting the returned, screen-cool version of himself, young Adam, quick as a flash but slight (“some babies are taller than me”), wasn’t exactly leading a hero’s life. Mourning the death of his father (Mark Ruffalo), the “godfather of time travel”, who died a year earlier, he was beaten up daily by a mocked threats (“Do you have anything else to say? Any jokes?”) by his high school rival, whom Adam also did provoked: “Who talks like that? Did you order something like a Bully Starter Kit from Amazon?” Adam finds it so seductive that he will one day be identical to the muscle man who ended up in his garage and is being pursued by a Robocop special forces in the service of a super villain (Catherine Keener). , that he gladly accepts a few logical contortions. The only thing that seems strange to him is that at the age of twelve he often seems smarter than his alter ego, who wants to use him to render harmless the heart of a time travel machine invented by his father (and thus all further development from this point onwards): “It seems as if I would have traded my brain for those muscles.”