The Adam Project
As with anything that stays on the top of Netflix’s Top 10 charts for a period of days, I eventually found myself watching The Adam Project, a new science fiction blockbuster jammed full of movie stars like Ryan Reynolds, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Garner and Zoe Saldana. Mild spoilers follow.
The movie has Reynolds crashing a time-traveling jet in 2022 where he meets a younger version of himself, played by Walker Scobell, a kid who is very good at playing a young Ryan Reynolds. The two are attempting to save both Reynolds’ wife who has gone missing (Saldana) and also prevent their father from inventing time-travel in the first place, which has now been corrupted by his old business partner and led to a dystopian future in 2050, as you might expect.
The movie brings up common time travel questions like…shouldn’t Reynolds interacting with his younger self totally destroy the space-time continuum? But this is not exactly a science-heavy exploration of the concept, as Reynolds is content to say that pretty much anything can happen during a time travel run, and it won’t be until you return to your original timeline that things will solidify, and you’ll lose any memories you had during that period. It does not make…a ton of sense, but it’s also the type of movie where it doesn’t matter very much.
The Adam Project
The Adam Project works namely because Ryan Reynolds is always charming, even if he’s playing variants of himself across movies like this, Red Notice, Free Guy and even Deadpool. He has a very good dynamic with Scobell as his younger self, and also Ruffalo when he finally appears as the pair’s father. Zoe Saldana is weirdly underused in the movie and appears and disappears almost instantly, which I found pretty bizarre.
There’s some decent action here. I particularly liked the “disintegration” effect when you kill someone who has been time traveling, and while they never really explain why Ryan Reynolds has what is essentially a lightsaber, it’s cool during fight sequences. The time jet dogfighting isn’t quite as good as the action on the ground, however.
In short, The Adam Project is a worthy diversion for a weekday evening, but probably far from a genre classic. It’s this situation that Netflix keeps getting into where they claim that in terms of total eyeballs, movies like The Adam Project and Red Notice that stay on top of its charts are getting Marvel movie-sized audiences, and yet feel like they lack the cultural impact or staying power of theatrical blockbusters. The Adam Project, with its 68% Rotten Tomatoes score and 77% audience score, feels like a movie that 40 million people will watch but no one will ever talk about again, until maybe The Adam Project 2 comes out, greenlit after so many viewers for the first. It feels like Netflix works for these movies more than these movie work for Netflix, and I keep seeing this time and time again with their originals.
Who knows, maybe I’m discounting the longevity of The Adam Project, but I kind of doubt it. Sure, I’ll recommend it, as now I view movies as essentially two episodes of a show put together, but these Netflix originals occupy a strange space these days.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
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