project time travel movie

‘The Adam Project’: Release Date, Trailer, Cast, Filming Details and Everything We Know So Far

Your changes have been saved

Email Is sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

No City Has Been Destroyed in Movies More Than This Disaster Epicenter

Stephen king called this gory remake the "best horror movie of the new century", this classic western is john wayne's true swan song — and it's not 'the shootist'.

The Adam Project is a sci-fi adventure story that follows a fighter pilot from the future who travels back in time to team up with his younger self and his father to change the future and save the world. We do wish there were two Ryan Reynolds in this movie. But no. There’s Reynolds of course, and there’s Walker Scobell playing a younger version of Reynolds’ character in this time-travel adventure flick. But let’s just say, it’s kind of like watching two versions of the Deadpool star.

The much-awaited Netflix original is directed by Shawn Levy, who is known for previously directing the Night at the Museum movie series, Real Steel , Arrival , and some episodes of Stranger Things , among other popular projects. This is Levy and Reynolds’ second film together after Free Guy , which was directed and produced by Levy, and starred Ryan Reynolds in the lead. Reynolds and Levy also serve as producers on the movie, along with David Ellison , Dana Goldberg , and Don Granger . The Adam Project is written by Jonathan Tropper , T.S. Nowlin , Jennifer Flackett , and Mark Levin .

The sci-fi adventure movie promises a story about love, loss, and healing, built on the premise of time travel, thus bridging the worlds of the past and the future. If this has already intrigued you enough to watch the movie, then here's everything that we know so far about The Adam Project , including the movie’s plot, release date, cast, characters, and more.

Related: 10 Netflix Films to Look Forward to in 2022

Watch The Adam Project Trailer

On February 10, 2022, Netflix released the official trailer of The Adam Project and in the short version of it, it looks absolutely fabulous, with action-packed scenes and fun moments between the younger and older Adams. In the longer version of it, released as an extended clip, we get a more detailed look at the story and the characters and what to really expect from this sci-fi movie. A second trailer was also released on March 1, 2022.

The first trailer shows a 12-year-old Adam Reed grieving his father’s death and his mother encouraging him to move on and look forward to his future. Ironically, his future happens to land in lap, literally, more like his backyard. A fighter pilot crash lands on his house, and he finds out that it is his future self. The two Adams try to get used to each other, albeit after a lot of bickering and ego-clashes. Although they really don’t get along, they must form a team and set out on a mission to change the past and the future. They must also find their father before his death so the three of them can save the world.

The trailers also reveal the other major characters, played by Jennifer Garner , Mark Ruffalo , and Zoe Saldana . Overall, from both the clips, The Adam Project gives the vibes of classic time-travel and sci-fi adventures, but with very 21st-century energy.

When Is The Adam Project’s Release Date?

The Adam Project releases on Netflix on Friday, March 11, 2022.

Related: ‘The Adam Project’: Ryan Reynolds Meets His Mini-Me in a New 4-Minute Clip

Who Is in The Adam Project’s Cast?

Besides Ryan Reynolds and Walker Scobell, The Adam Project boasts quite a cast. It features Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, Catherine Keener , and Alex Mallari Jr. in major roles. The upcoming movie also sees Ruffalo and Garner reuniting after 18 years on screen. Their last project, 13 Going on 30 , was released in 2004.

Who Are the Confirmed Characters in The Adam Project?

The star-studded cast of The Adam Project promises an exciting story, revolving around interesting characters. Let’s look at who's playing who in this sci-fi adventure –

Ryan Reynolds as Adam Reed – Adam is a fighter pilot and in 2050, who time travels to 2022 to find his love interest who has mysteriously gotten lost in the time-space continuum. For his mission, Adam has to team up with his younger self and his father, so he can change the future by changing the past.

Walker Scobell as young Adam Reed – At 12-year-old, he is grieving his father's death and often gets into trouble. When he meets with his future self, he is suspicious yet surprised. Despite not liking his older version, he joins him on a mission to change the future.

Zoe Saldaña as Laura – Laura is Adam’s love interest in the future. She goes missing in a time-space anomaly and Adam must find her by traveling to the past.

Mark Ruffalo as Louis Reed – Louis is Adam’s father and a brilliant physicist who worked on time travel. After his death, his findings are used to redefine time jumps.

Jennifer Garner as Ellie Reed – Ellie is Adam’s mother and Louis’s wife. She seems to be a good support system to Adam after his father passes away.

Catherine Keener as the antagonist – She is the story’s villain who has stolen a powerful technology from Louis that could destroy the world in the wrong hands.

Alex Mallari Jr. as Christos – Christos is the right-hand man of the antagonist, played by Catherine Keener.

When Is The Adam Project Filming?

The filming for The Adam Projec t started in November 2020 and was wrapped up in March 2021.

Related: ‘The Adam Project’ Screenwriter Reveals New Details on His Ryan Reynolds Time Travel Netflix Movie

When Is The Adam Project Set?

Since it's a time travel movie, the setting does involve multiple time periods. The story of The Adam Project goes back and forth between now and a few decades in the future. The older Adam comes from 2050, back to 2022, when he is 12 years old. So, it’s technically set in the present day and goes all the way to the 2050s.

What Is The Adam Project’s Story?

At its core, The Adam Project is a story about time travel and adventure but it is also the story of a father and son. The plot follows Adam Reed as a fighter pilot from the future who travels back in time and meets his younger self. He is technically here to find and rescue the love of his life who is supposedly lost in a space-time glitch.

Adam lands in the time when he is 12-year-old and in the house where he grew up. But when Adam sees his younger self, he doesn’t like him. The younger Adam has just lost his father and is in grief. He often gets into trouble at school and finds it difficult to come to terms with his father’s death. The older Adam, on the other hand, has learned to deal with his dad’s absence from his life and that has led to some resentment.

Despite all the differences, the young and the adult versions of him try to work as a team to find their father. For one, Adam needs to save the future of the Earth from a threat, and to do that he must change a few things in his past. While he does that, he also realizes that he has to come to terms with his past life and make things right for himself and for the world. Not a lot about the mission is disclosed, but from what we see in the trailer, it seems like the two Adams have a lot of challenges and dangerous enemies to deal with. They have to learn to work with each other to be able to fight through and save the day.

• Movie Features
• Ryan Reynolds

Den of Geek

The Adam Project Ending and Time Travel Explained

Netflix's The Adam Project whizzes through its exposition to crack on with more action and jokes, so we take a step back to figure out how any of this worked.

• Share on Facebook (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Twitter (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Linkedin (opens in a new tab)
• Share on email (opens in a new tab)

This article contains major spoilers for The Adam Project

The Adam Project is a super fun new sci-fi movie from Netflix that speeds through its key rules and pretty much asks you not to worry about them, but if you’re the kind of person that worries about the rules, you’re gonna worry about them anyway!

Let’s look at how Netflix’s big budget family movie sets out the past, present, and future, and explore the film’s hopeful ending, which wipes the slate clean for a planet on the road to some very, very bad times.

Why Did Adam Travel Back in Time?

Hotshot pilot Adam Reed ( Ryan Reynolds ) is on a mission to locate and rescue his wife, Laura (Zoe Saldana). Against the rules laid out by his superiors headed up by Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener) in a dystopian 2050, he steals a jet and time-jumps back to 2018 to find out what happened to Laura but accidentally winds up in 2022 instead, where he meets his cute-but-mouthy 12-year-old self (played by Walker Scobell), whose tiny frame, asthma issues, and “punchable face” are a long way from the tall, handsome, and incredibly ripped version of Future Adam.

Ad – content continues below

Realising he’s misjudged the time jump by four years, Adam has little patience for the tricky situation he’s now in, and the awful way Young Adam treats his mother Ellie (Jennifer Garner) after his father’s sudden death. In the future, Adam has shifted his anger and grief from his mother’s shoulders onto his dead dad’s legacy: it turns out daddy Louis (Mark Ruffalo) was the one who accidentally invented time travel in the first place, causing a chain reaction that led to a very bleak future for everyone, including Adam.

The Time Jet

Gritting his teeth and buckling down, Future Adam realizes he needs Young Adam to fix his damaged ship , as the time jet’s controls work by recognizing the user’s DNA. Because Adam is injured, the jet won’t let him fix the damage or fly it. However, Young Adam’s uninjured DNA will apparently work just fine in a pinch so that Adam can heal and hopefully take over control of the ship after repairs are complete. Unfortunately, Adam doesn’t heal before he jumps back to 2018, and so Young Adam has to stick around.

Meanwhile, the villainous Sorian and her clean up crew track the time jet back to the past, where Adam has temporarily escaped her clutches.

Time Travel Logic

Young Adam is excited to meet his buff older self, but is naturally very confused and inquisitive about how time travel works. He wants to know if Adam remembers everything that’s happening, since they’re the same person and all. Or maybe this is a multiverse situation where these events are kickstarting a completely different timeline now that Adam has interfered with the past?

Adam rebuffs as many questions from his younger self as possible and dismisses the notion of a multiverse, mocking him for watching too many movies (the MCU is shaking), telling him that when he goes back to the future his memories of these events will be restored so that he knows what happened, but right now he doesn’t know how all this is going to end or how much of a mess he’s made of the timeline, which is fixed on “a quantum level.”

Yes, unlike those pesky Avengers: Endgame time travel rules , Adam can absolutely change the future here by traveling back to the past, and his quest to find out what exactly happened to his wife Laura may do just that.

Adam’s Wife Laura

Adam tells Young Adam how he met his wife, Laura, when he was still at the academy. She had arrived late to a lecture and was in the wrong building. He’d offered to walk her to where she needed to be and he fell head over heels in love with her.

Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!

In the future, Laura hadn’t come back from a time jump, and Adam was informed that her jet broke up on re-entry. He refused to believe this because Laura was the best pilot in their program. He discovered her flight logs were altered by someone keen to hide the truth, and that’s why he first decided to hop back to 2018 and investigate her fateful mission.

Adam suspects that Future Sorian was involved in Laura’s disappearance, and Young Adam is perplexed. To him, Young Sorian is simply his dead dad’s lovely business partner.

Laura eventually shows up to fight with Adam in 2022 while his younger self tags along. She has been in hiding for the last four years waiting for Adam to come and find her. Laura tells him that her mission to 2018 went awry after she began investigating jump logs that indicated someone had been visiting that point in history and was wiping the data.

Laura explains that it was Future Sorian, who has been tinkering with the early months of time travel development in order to engineer a glorious future by giving her younger self tips on how to get the job done. Sorian has already changed the future using her tech knowledge and past working relationship with Adam’s father, and this future is now the only one Adam knows. It’s…not good.

It’s clear that Adam has to go back to 2018 – for real this time – and stop time travel from ever being invented, even if it means losing Laura forever. Laura then dies keeping Future Sorian busy so that Adam and Young Adam can escape to 2018.

Sorian’s Deal

Adam is pursued into the past by Future Sorian, who is dead set on eliminating Adam to make sure he doesn’t meddle with her illustrious future as the Queen of Pretty Much Everything.

Thanks to her nefarious time jumps, Sorian has gotten rich off Adam’s dad’s time travel tech, and become incredibly powerful. In the future she has control over the most valuable resource on Earth: time travel. Why did she do all this? Because in the past that she has now changed, the government originally took the time travel tech and research away from her in the wake of Louis’ death, and she was left feeling like all the money and huge life sacrifices she made for the company were pointless.

Once again traveling back to 2018, Future Sorian tells Young Sorian that they need to clean up the Adam problem before its too late.

The MacGuffin

Adam’s dad Louis invents the magnetic particle accelerator circa 2018 while working with Sorian. He dubs his research “The Adam Project” (hey, that’s the name of the film!) and Future Adam has to convince him to destroy everything he’s worked for to prevent time travel technology from evolving.

It’s not an easy task. Louis and Adam had a difficult relationship when he was a child because Louis spent a lot of time at work, and Adam felt neglected. The two come to blows when they meet, but Louis eventually understands that the only way to save humanity from Sorian’s terrible future is to destroy The Adam Project.

Adam, Young Adam and Louis infiltrate the Sorian Technology facility in order to shut down The Adam Project for good. All they need to do is to remove and kill the crystal hard drive at the heart of the magnetic particle accelerator , because apart from this single piece of physical tech Louis never shared the algorithm that makes it all work with anyone else.

The Ending Explained

As Louis and Adam set out to complete their mission, the Sorians intervene to stop them changing their future, and Future Sorian threatens to kill Young Adam. Louis tries to reason with her to no avail, and Sorian accidentally ruptures the electromagnetic seal containing the MPA. Magnetic items are drawn towards the MPA, and the reactor begins to fall apart.

Future Sorian then tries to kill Louis and take the hard drive, but the armor-piercing bullet deflects towards the MPA and kills her younger self instead, eliminating Future Sorian from the timeline. Louis is confused because the two versions of his son are still lingering in the past when they should have also disappeared, but the pair assure him that it is happening, albeit more slowly than with Sorian.

Louis comes to understand that he will soon die, leaving Adam alone with his mother. He refuses to hear critical information that will save his life, as he already feels conflicted about changing the future of time travel itself, let alone his own future path, but he takes the little time they all have left to reconcile with his sons, and the trio play one last game of catch before the Adams vanish.

Future Adam tells Young Adam that he should take the time to appreciate his mom, and realizes that his own efforts to escape the memories of his youth were futile and damaging. Meanwhile, Louis is left with the understanding that he should spend more time with his family before he dies.

Back in 2022, Young Adam begins forging a more loving relationship with Ellie. In a flash-forward to the future, we discover than Laura was right to hope that she and Adam would still meet and fall in love in the future, and we see their encounter at the academy play out under the same circumstances described by Adam earlier in the film.

Kirsten Howard | @emotionalpedant

Kirsten Howard has paid their dues. Yes sir, the check is in the mail.

‘The Adam Project’ Review: Ryan Reynolds Meets His 12-Year-Old Self in Shawn Levy’s Back-to-the-Future Action Confection

Their first collaboration after "Free Guy" is just a clever derivative trifle, but it shows why this star and director bring out the best in each other.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

• In 1999, ‘Run Lola Run’ Saw the Future. Rereleased 25 Years Later, the Film Is More Exhilarating Than Ever 2 days ago
• ‘The Watchers’ Review: Ishana Night Shyamalan Directs a Glossy Woodland Horror Thriller. The Twist? The Film Is More Promising Than Good 3 days ago
• ‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’ Review: Will Smith and Martin Lawrence Make the Franchise’s Fourth Entry Tastier Than It Has Any Right to Be 5 days ago

Somewhere along the line, Ryan Reynolds became the most playful actor we have. That might sound like faint praise; some would call him silly or lightweight or even, in his aggro irreverance, a touch smarmy. But genuine fast-break insolence is a quality that’s missing from the lumbering cheek of most of our paint-by-numbers blockbusters. Reynolds has a knack for playing characters who are nonchalantly macho but with an amusing touch of cowardice, a contradiction he invests with a kind of innocence. He’s got a Nervous Nellie side that humanizes him, especially when it takes the form of a nerd’s verbal machine-gun fire. In his way, he’s a new screen type: the brainy goof in a pinup’s body.

Last summer, in the diabolically clever video-game head trip “Free Guy,” Reynolds finally got to be in a movie where the jittery digital-age fantasy elements skittered by every bit as quickly as his rapid-patter mind. The film was as jammed with media as Spielberg’s “Ready Player One,” but more relaxed about its own insanity, and that seemed to liberate Reynolds; it was the most accomplished work he’d done since “Deadpool.” The director Shawn Levy , who made the “Night at the Museum” films, also hit a new peak — of life-is-a-screen-and-we-just-live-in-it imaginative verve. “Free Guy” was the rare sleeper hit of the pandemic era, and Reynolds and Levy emerged from it as a kind of team. These two click rhythmically and chemically. They bring something out in each other.

Related Stories

Virtual production market grows as average stage size contracts, 'dexter' prequel series adds four to cast as production begins.

“ The Adam Project ” is their follow-up collaboration (both are executive producers of it), but it’s the Netflix version: a notch more anonymous, packed with fantasy and action as if it were being financed by the yard. At its best, though, you feel the exuberance of the Reynolds/Levy connection. The movie is a total trifle, but it’s often a diverting one — a wide-eyed sci-fi adventure with a screwball buoyancy.

Popular on Variety

Reynolds, in a beard that makes him look like a smirky G.I. Joe, plays Adam Reed, a time-tripping renegade fighter pilot from the year 2050 who travels back to 2022, where he hooks up with his 12-year-old self: a small-for-his-age blond kid, played by the terrific Walker Scobell, who makes up for his stature — and for just about everything else — with the size of his brain and the sharpness of his mouth. He’s a sweet kid, yet so cuttingly observant that he can talk himself into getting punched by the school bully. Adam razzes his mother, Ellie ( Jennifer Garner ), and since they’re both still coping with the death of his father in a car accident a year-and-a-half before, she experiences the effrontery as an attack.

Adam, in cynical movie terms, needs a buddy who can be a father figure. And what buddy could be more ideal for him than his own self, 30 years later? Reynolds’ Adam, who drops into a woods lit with ’70s Spielbergian blue light and skulks around bleeding from a bullet wound, talks as much smack as 12-year-old Adam does. He’s just what the kid need and deserves. But there are, in addition, a whole lotta back-to-the-future logistical backflips going on. The premise of “The Adam Project” is that time travel exists, and that adult Adam has traveled back to the wrong year — he really wanted to land in 2018, so that he could stop Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener), his diabolical flight commander, from returning to that same year and causing all kinds of dastardly things to happen, starting with the death of Adam’s wife, Laura (Zoe Saldaña).

“The Adam Project” is the kind of time-travel movie that spins your head until it turns your head to mush. It’s the sort of film in which Catherine Keener, facing off against her de-aged self, warns of “the potential for catastrophic changes to the time stream,” and all you can think is: I liked time better before it became the time stream. These films bend over backwards to chase the tail of their own “logic” (if you go back in time and meet your younger self, how will that mess with the cosmos? And if, in fact, you change anything , how will that mess with the cosmos?), but the questions are inevitably more incisive than the answers. Because the simple eternal truth is that the more you think about time travel the way this movie asks you to, the less sense it makes.

But “The Adam Project” isn’t heavy-duty sci-fi. It’s a glossy bauble of a caper that uses time travel as a frame for action that’s staged as effusively as the demolition in a Road Runner cartoon. For a few scenes, the movie is “Top Gun” in the northwest. Then it’s a “Star Wars” ninja video game with adult Adam using a double-sided industrial light saber to fend off an army of metal droids that he reduces, with each saber slash, to orange-pink psychedelic powder. And once the characters return to the pivotal year of 2018, it becomes an absent-daddy bonding movie (more Spielberg!) with Adam’s late physicist father, played as a scruffy volatile professor by Mark Ruffalo , alive and well, which he needs to be because he’s the scientist who invented time travel. To save the future, Adam wants to eliminate that miraculous ability from the earth. But if he does, how will he meet Saldaña’s perky Laura?

The action scenes are choreographed to classic rock — “Gimme Some Lovin’,” “Foreplay/Long Time” by Boston, Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times, Bad Times.” The real time travel in this movie is back to the days when even action could be a boisterous form of feel-good entertainment. “The Adam Project” is the definition of trivial, and on the small screen it overstays its welcome by about 15 minutes, but it’s a brashly likable piece of antic high-powered fluff. Here’s my own leap into the future: As a team, Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy are going to make much better movies than this one, but you can feel the tastiness of their combo even in a kinetic marshmallow like “The Adam Project.” They’re not trying to fake fun.

Reviewed online, March 8, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 106 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of a Skydance Entertainment, Maximum Effort, 21 Laps production. Producers: David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Shawn Levy, Ryan Reynolds. Executive producers: Mary McLaglen, Josh McLaglen, Dan Levine, Dan Cohen, George Dewey, Patrick Gooing, Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin.
• Crew: Director: Shawn Levy. Screenplay: Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin. Camera: Tobias Schliessler. Editors: Dean Zimmerman, Jonathan Corn. Music: Rob Simonsen.
• With: Ryan Reynolds, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Garner, Walker Scobell, Zoe Saldaña, Catherine Keener.

More from Variety

Michael angarano and michael cera on fatherhood, casting kristen stewart and making the buddy comedy ‘sacramento’, the state of generative ai in hollywood: a special report, variety tv fyc fest recap: virtual reality dramas, a ‘frasier’ reunion, tv icons and creators talk the future of television, gainax, japanese anime firm behind ‘neon genesis evangelion,’ files for bankruptcy, price chart for leading subscription video streaming services: updated with new max prices, julia butters joins ‘freaky friday 2’ at disney, more from our brands, ‘it was all a dream’ shows the early days of hip-hop — warts and all, patek philippe is not happy sylvester stallone flipped that $5.4 million grand master chime, mlbpa seeks to export union power with oneteam joint venture, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, stuck in a dead-end relationship with love is blind try showtime’s couples therapy, verify it's you, please log in.

The Adam Project: Plot And Ending Explained (Timeline Diagram)

Barry's time travel review score.

• Repercussion
• Rewatchability

BaTTR Score

What’s BaTTR Score?

The Adam Project is a 2022 time-travel action film directed by Shawn Levy. The story is centred on a man who travels back in time and accidentally lands in the wrong year and runs into his younger self; the two team up to save the future. The time travel logic in the film is all over the place, but the witty humour keeps the film interesting. The film has a big cast with Ryan Reynolds, Jennifer Garner, Zoe Saldaña, Mark Ruffalo and Catherine Keener. Walker Scobell has done a wonderful job as young Adam. Jennifer and Mark paired up after 13 Going On 30 after 18 years, much like in the film. Here’s the plot and ending of The Adam Project explained; spoilers ahead.

Hollywordle – Check out my new Hollywood Wordle game!

Where To Watch?

To find where to stream any movie or series based on your country, use This Is Barry’s Where To Watch .

Oh, and if this article doesn’t answer all of your questions, drop me a comment or an FB chat message, and I’ll get you the answer .  You can find other film explanations using the search option on top of the site.

Here are links to the key aspects of the movie:

• – Time Travel Rules: What Is Fixed Time? 
• – Timeline Diagram
• – How Did The Dad Die
• – Plot Explained
• – Timeline-1: Who is Sorian? What does she want?
• – Timeline-2: What Happened To Laura?
• – Timeline-3: Why does Adam steal that jet?
• – Timeline-4: The Adam Project Finale
• – Ending Explained
• – Did Sorian kill the dad?

The Adam Project Time Travel Rules : What Is Fixed Time ? 

Just as Deadpool calls it out in his movie, lazy writing appears to have followed Ryan into this movie for all the time travel concepts (but it is compensated with the witty dialogues). In The Adam Project, young Adam brings up a valid point – he asks if the old Adam remembers meeting himself decades ago. Old Adam doesn’t. Young Adam asks if old Adam is from the future of a Parallel Reality (like we saw in Avengers: Endgame ). Old Adam sushes him, saying he watches too many movies.

Old Adam then explains that every person at each biological age belongs to one time; this is called their  Fixed Time . What does this mean? If a person is born in 2000, then that person is latched with the flow of time starting in the year 2000. When the person is 2 years old, their Fixed Time  is the year 2002.

When Adam travels outside his Fixed Time, 2050, he has left his  place  at a quantum level . Until he returns to his Fixed Time, his memories will not be affected by the events in 2022. And this is why old Adam does not yet have any memories of having met himself when he was a young boy. However, when old Adam returns to his Fixed Time, his previous memories will be gone and replaced by an alternate set of memories corresponding to the altered events.

While this fictional theory is fresh, the film goes ahead and shoots itself in the groin with the Grandfather Paradox… repeatedly.

The Adam Project: Timeline Diagram

The Adam Project: How Did The Dad Die

The dad happens to die because of a car accident. A genuine accident that was not caused by Sorian or any other time traveller. And in all timelines in the film, the dad dies because of that same accident. The accident is not vital to the plot, but this seems to be a pressing question for everyone, so it was best to get it out of the way. 

The Adam Project: Plot Explained

Timeline-1: who is sorian what does she want.

Sorian is the dad’s partner, and she is funding his research on wormholes. This research accidentally leads to the discovery of time travel. Timeline-1 is not shown in the movie. It appears that once the dad died, Sorian was sidelined, and political forces took control of the time device. Though she was the one who funded the project, she is left with nothing. So, at some time in the future in Timeline-1 (perhaps 2050), Sorian makes an illegal jump to 2018 to meet her younger self.

Like old Biff in Back To The Future II, old Sorian makes like a tree and gets out of there after giving her younger self enough stock tips to amass a fortune. She also explains how to keep complete control of the Time Program by eliminating any political obstacles. This information exchange makes way for an altered timeline, Timeline-2. Once old Sorian returns to her Fixed Time, her memories of a failed life are erased and replaced with ones where she is all-powerful. This timeline is the one we see at the movie’s beginning.

Timeline-2: What Happened To Laura?

In 2050, Laura, who works in the Time Program, notices a log entry of Sorian’s jet returning from 2018, but no jet ever left to 2018. To investigate, Laura goes back to 2018 to dig deeper. Sorian plants an altitude bomb on Laura’s jet. But the bomb goes off after Laura reaches 2018, and she manages to eject safely. Laura is trapped in the past without her jet and lives her life out, hoping and waiting that Adam will come looking for her one day. In 2050, Sorien announces that Laura died in an accident during her re-entry.

Timeline-3: Why does Adam steal that jet?

Old Adam smells something fishy about Laura’s death and steals a jump jet to go back to 2018 and look for her. Unfortunately, he’s shot in the process and enters the wrong time coordinates, and lands up in 2022. He goes over to the only place he remembers, his old home. He confides in young Adam and dresses his wounds. Old Adam’s meddling with the past causes a new timeline, Timeline-3.

Sorian travels to 2022 with a team and arrests old Adam. Laura, who’s been living in the past from 2018 to 2022, has constantly been scanning for old Adam’s arrival. She shows up and helps take down Sorian’s men; they make a run for it. Laura explains that the only way they can end the time chaos is if old Adam went back to 2018 and stopped time travel from being invented. Bang! – that’s the sound of the film shooting itself with the Grandfather Paradox. Old Adam doesn’t like this idea because if they change the stream of time, he and Laura will not meet.

What is the  Echo  that Laura talks about?

Laura’s theory is that even if the time stream is altered and everyone’s memories are replaced with new ones, an echo of the earlier memories will remain. So she theorizes that old Adam and Laura will meet and fall in love even in the new timeline because they will feel that inexplicable connection . Sending the Adams away, Laura takes on Sorien’s team and is killed.

The jet is meshed with old Adam’s DNA, and it will not start because it senses his injury. So, old Adam needs young Adam to be on the jet till they get to an appropriate altitude to fire up the wormhole. Because the plan is to find their dad, young Adam agrees to travel to 2018 with old Adam.

Timeline-4: The Adam Project Finale

The two Adams travel back to 2018 and meet their dad and explain that his accidental invention of the time machine results in his partner, Sorian, creating a horrendous future. Old Adam explains the importance of destroying the device that will eventually give birth to the time machine.

Old Sorien follows the Adams to 2018 and meets young Sorien to warn her that the Adams are trying to stop her from achieving her greatness. We need to understand that Timeline-3 is a branch of Timeline-2 and not Timeline-1 (see the diagram). Two months back, Young Sorien has already been met by an Old Sorien from Timeline-1 who has given her enough intel to alter her life. After that, Timeline-2 was born, and old Soren’s memories were replaced with an evil, successful life. In this scene, old Sorien is from Timeline-2, and that is why she can’t remember travelling to meet young Sorien.

The flaw in the writing in this scene is that old Sorien somehow clearly remembers events from Timeline-1, which is not possible. At best, she could have echoes, but not be able to recollect precisely about having a lonely life. Those memories should have been erased for her.

Destroying The Time Device

The two Adams, with the help of their dad, fight off Sorien’s men. Oddly, as old Adam and daddy enter the building, they leave young Adam out in the open and Sorien’s men grab him (duh!). Dad explains that they need to destroy the diamond-hard neuromorphic processor (a fancy hard drive). Before they can, old and young Sorien show up with young Adam held hostage. Young Adam shoves the gun away, and the stray bullet hits the electromagnet’s seal. 

Young Sorien is not yet evil and is unable to shoot dad and take the hard drive. Old Sorien asks her younger self to step aside, and she fires at dad. Unfortunately, the electromagnet alters the bullet’s path and kills young Sorien instead. This event erases Old-Sorien from existence in this timeline, and she disappears. Bang! – Grandfather Paradox.

The two Adams and their dad walk away, knowing time travel will never be invented. Bang! The ripple effect from the altered time stream, for some bizarre reason, gives the Adams a little extra wind-down time with their dad. Dad refuses to gain knowledge of his death, and the three play catch instead. In a short while, the Adams are gone.

Here’s a thought on Laura. Remember she mentions that she was in 2018 waiting for Adam. Not sure why she wasn’t written into the climax. Given Laura was present in 2018 and keeping an eye out for Adam, it would have made sense if she located and joined him for the finale.

The Adam Project: Ending Explained

The ending of The Adam Project shows us that a new timeline created by the two Adams where the time machine is not invented. Adam’s dad however dies in the accident, and echoes  stay with the people in this timeline. Eventually, in 2022, young Adam feels like giving his mom a tight hug as requested by his older self. And in the future, old Adam and Laura meet in a different class. Fate seems to have recreated the same scenario of Laura walking into the wrong class and running into Adam, who offers to walk with her. The two have an inexplicable feeling ( echo ) for one another and begin their happy lives together.

Did Sorian kill the dad?

No, Sorian didn’t kill the dad. Though the film trivializes the accident, a valid question here would be, how do the Adams know for sure that the car crash was not accomplished on purpose by Sorian? In the climax, they destroy the time machine and young Sorian is killed. Despite this, the dad is dead in the final timeline, Timeline -4. And that’s how we know for sure that no one plotted the dad’s death.

And that’s that. How did you like the plot and ending of The Adam Project? Liked it? Hated it? Leave your thoughts about the film in the comments below.

Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products. His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. He’s regularly available for a chat conversation on his website and consults on storyboarding from time to time. Click to browse all his film articles

Top 100 Time Travel Movies

1. Back to the Future

2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

3. The Terminator

4. The Butterfly Effect

5. Back to the Future Part II

6. 12 Monkeys

7. Groundhog Day

8. Avengers: Endgame

9. X-Men: Days of Future Past

10. Interstellar

11. Predestination

13. Palm Springs

14. Midnight in Paris

15. Timecrimes

16. Edge of Tomorrow

17. About Time

18. The Time Traveler's Wife

19. Back to the Future Part III

20. Time Sweep

21. Star Trek

22. Flight of the Navigator

24. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

25. Men in Black³

More to explore, recently viewed.

Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, sweepstakes, and more!

12 essential time travel movies you should watch after seeing 'The Adam Project'

If The Adam Project got your paradoxical particles zinging with inspiration, SYFY WIRE has a bunch of other great time-travel movies to watch too. 

The Adam Project , director Shawn Levy’s new family-centric, time-travel adventure, became part of our timeline when it premiered on Netflix on March 11. Ryan Reynolds stars as Adam Reed, a time-traveling fighter pilot in the future who crashes into the past (our 2022) and connects with his 12-year-old self to save the future. Confused? 

It all makes sense , but most importantly, the film got us revisiting the past and thinking about all of the fantastic time travel movies that have been accessible to both kids and adults. If after watching The Adam Project , you’re enamored with the idea of time travel and want to watch more of them in your future, we’ve got a grab bag of equally worthwhile movies with the genre that are meant to spark imaginations to even greater heights.

1. 13 Going on 30

Jennifer Garner nails the “teen inside an adult body” vibe that’s so necessary to sell the charm of this wish fulfillment comedy. She plays a nerdy 13-year-old who desperately wants to be part of the popular crowd, but gets pranked by them instead. After a desperate birthday wish to be "30, flirty, and thriving,” she wakes up 17 years in the future, exactly as she hoped. Garner’s unbridled enthusiasm yet awkward gangliness is a sight to see. It’s also a movie that appeals to kids who will totally get the fantasy of being grown-up, and adults who can wistfully appreciate the realities of adulthood and the hard knocks experienced along the way. 

2. Back to the Future

Credit: Universal

Back to the Future remains a pinnacle title in the genre because of Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, and the ensemble cast’s pitch-perfect performances. They’re why we buy the absurd high concept premise of a DeLorean  turned into a time machine. Perhaps kids respond so well to the movie because the script does such an efficient job explaining the twisty, paradox-filled concept and then it doesn’t pander to audiences of any age. Younger viewers get the stakes, the weirdness of Marty’s mom crushing on him, and the almost cartoonish charm of Lloyd’s Doc Brown. It’s a perfect entry point title for the time travel genre. If you like this one, then just wait until you see what else is out there.

3. The Bill & Ted Trilogy

Credit: Orion Pictures

The beguiling dudes of Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and "Ted" Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves) dumb down time travel for the masses, and we’re forever grateful to them. The two besties from the Valley have a lot of air between their ears, but plenty of heart beating in their chest’s. Without a doubt, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) is the best of the trilogy but there are plenty of charms to be had in all three installments of their adventures through time. There’s also a tailor-made appeal to audiences of a younger age, who can see themselves in the less than stellar students and sorta floundering young men. And then the third installment reaches across the generation gap by including their daughters which brings the whole premise into the now and gives the guys an arc that earns an enthusiastic “Excellent!”

Adam Sandler is the poster-guy for arrested development, which is stitched into 90 percent of his film projects, which is why Click is a natural fit. He plays Michael Newman, an overworked family man who is getting clobbered at work and watching his family life suffer. Instead of making some life-changing choices, he uses a magical remote to fast-forward through the rough spots, time-jumping through his life to the better parts until he is forced to face the repercussions of his avoidance. Sandler makes the comedy relatable for all ages and it’s a fun concept to play within, until it gets a bit dark towards the end. But there’s a strong moral to the story about being present and not disappearing inside the boob tube when you can take control of your life. 

5. Flight of the Navigator

An old school Walt Disney title from 1986, it tells the adventures of 12-year-old David Freeman (Joey Cramer ), an average kid who gets abducted by aliens and is taken eight years into the future. His family thinks he was just missing, but David was taken to planet Phaelon and given a brain full of alien information and knowledge. It’s a bit dated today but it certainly hits the nostalgia buttons for Gen-Xers and captures that Amblin ethos of capable kids doing incredible things. 

6. Futurama: Bender's Big Score

After fading away from the Fox lineup, Futurama was resurrected (the first time) in 2007 as a series of four direct-to-video movies, starting with Bender’s Big Score . The complicated plot has Bender ( John DiMaggio ) getting involved with a bunch of scammers who use the morally-compromised robot to steal history's treasures throughout time. Due to paradoxes and multiple Fryes (Billy West), the whole adventure ends with a cliffhanger tear in the fabric of space. Ridiculous, but as is the case with the show, always scientifically minded if not always completely sound.

7. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

This 2006 animated sequel to the book of the same name is kinda like the teenage girl version of Groundhog Day . Young Makoto Konno discovers she has the power to “time leap” with a tattoo that lets her know how many times she is allowed to jump in time. It ends up being an affecting romance and clever story about choice and destiny. Often positively compared to the works of Studio Ghibli, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is now considered a modern anime classic.  

8. Groundhog Day

Credit: Columbia Pictures

“Phil? Phil Conners? I thought that was you!” If you know Harold Ramis’ classic time loop comedy Groundhog Day , then you know that quote perfectly encapsulates the spirit of hilarity and misery inherent to the film. Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, an arrogant local weatherman covering the Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, PA. What should be a one-day stay in the tiny burgh ends up becoming an endless repeat of that single day for Phil, as he desperately tries to break the cycle and get back home. Heartfelt, and silly, Groundhog Day makes a poignant lesson out of kindness, self-betterment, and never letting a groundhog drive.

9. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Even if you’re not into Star Trek , this 1986 installment featuring the Original Crew on the big screen is easily the most accessible movie of them all. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are at their comedic best and the story is as resonant as ever as the future Starfleet heroes go back in time to recover some humpback whales necessary to resolving a crisis. Young viewers will get the ecological message (and wonder at the old tech of the era), while older viewers can appreciate the chemistry and very Trek messages at its narrative core.

10. Mr. Peabody and Sherman

The once small screen heroes from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends leaped to the big screen in 2014 for a computer animated adventure featuring the brilliant Peabody and his "way back" time machine. Today's kids are likely unfamiliar with the old, hand-drawn Mr. Peabody and Sherman cartoons, but this movie introduced the egg-head duo to a new generation without losing the charm of the original 1960’s cartoon. The time-jumping is also a great way to sneak some history into a kid’s brain without them feeling the pain of textbooks. 

11. Meet the Robinsons

Based on the book, A Day with Wilbur Robinson , this CG animated adaptation from Walt Disney Animation has two pint-sized time travelers making trouble with their inventions. Twelve-year old Lewis meets his match in 13-year old Wilbur Robinson who says he’s a time cop from the future. A twisty adventure that also works as a great primer for the genre, it appeals with the complexities of the premise and the ridiculousness of their impact across time. 

12. Time Bandits

Image Credit: HandMade Films

A perfect blend of British absurdism from Terry Gilliam and timeless adventure, Time Bandits was the entry point for a lot of Gen-Xers into British comedy with an all-star cast of some Monty Python alum and the likes of Sean Connery, Ian Holm, and Ralph Richardson. It’s a bit too busy to follow at times, but its history-loving hero, Kevin (Craig Warnock) is a great relatable character for the young viewers while the adults will get the fun on a whole other level. Plus, it all comes down to a toaster oven and that’s about as low-fi cool as it gets.

• Back To The Future
• The Adam Project
• Time Travel

Related Stories

Everything We Know About the New Jason Bourne Movie

Monkey Man Streaming Exclusively on Peacock: How to Watch

Daniel Craig Explains Why His James Bond Had to Die

How Mad Max Pioneered the Post-Apocalyptic Worlds We Love

Remembering Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in The Rundown

Knock at the Cabin's Abby Quinn on Getting Killed by Shyamalan

Vin Diesel Righted the Science Fiction Ship with Riddick

Wonder Woman: DC’s Most Complete Movie Since Batman

'Pitch Black' and the Science of Enhanced Vision

Chris Pratt Mourns Jurassic World Stunt Double

Abigail Star Reveals Alternate Ending for Vampire Flick

Spy Kids is Still a Benchmark For Latinx Representation in Blockbusters

Recommended for you.

Linda Hamilton on Resident Alien Role: "I'm Not the Funny Girl, I'm the Straight Man"

The Classic Twilight Zone Episode That Inspired Jordan Peele's Us

Resident Alien's Alan Tudyk on Harry's New Love Interest, Edi Patterson's Blue Avian

How 'Project Almanac' Is More Of A 2015 Time Travel Movie Than 'Back To The Future II' Was [Set Visit]

We've all seen time travel, but we've never seen time travel the Michael Bay way. Bay is one of the producers of Project Almanac , a found-footage time travel movie described as Primer meets Chronicle . In the film, time travel is raw, gritty and painful. Bay's time travel is pretty unique, and will be handled by the film's director Dean Israelite .

"I'm South African, so I fly to South Africa all of the time and I'm totally f****d up after a twenty-four hour flight," said the first time director. "And I haven't time travelled. So If I'm f****d up just going on a plane, what are these characters going to feel like when they go back in time?"

He went on to describe how, in Project Almanac , time travel involves weightlessness, electromagnetic fields, and all sorts of environmental craziness. In short, this isn't time travel you're used to seeing in other films that may or many not have been set in this year.

But, to be frank, we didn't see it either. Much of that time travel visualization will be done in post. When we visited the Atlanta, GA set of Project Almanac on July 1, 2013, Israelite was shooting the most important time-travel excursion of the film. In it, a tight-knit group of friends go to the bathroom during school and travel back in time to go Lollapalooza. Girls in bikinis and guys in chain mail, peacock feathers, leis, neon tank tops, beer hats, body paint, rainbow wigs and all the madness you'd expect at a music festival were on set. It was a crazy scene, one that plays a pivotal role in the January 31 film, and a great example of how Project Almanac is doing time travel in a very modern, 2015-ready way.

Below, read more of our  Project Almanac set visit.

The Beginning

Let's travel back to the very beginning. Writers Jason Harry Pagan and Andrew Deutschman had been thinking about doing a time travel movie for a long time, but they didn't just want their movie to go back in history like other movies. They thought "Let's just actually play with the time machine," Deutschman said. "Watch kids try to get back further, and further, and further, and do more damage in their life. And treat time travel as more of a superpower than actually just a place to go to like other movies have."

Once a draft was written, Deutschman used some of his Hollywood connections to get the script to Platinum Dunes. They loved it, developed it for several years before pitching it to Paramount, who also loved it. Much has changed in that time. Originally it wasn't fully designed as a  found-footage film, for example. Plus, the original title was simply "Almanac," suggesting a link to a certain book that plays a big part in another time travel film, Back to the Future Part II . The producers and writers never could have known, when they first encountered the script, the movie would come out in the same year that film was set.

In the film, Project Almanac is the name of the secret project the kids discover that makes time travel possible. The word "almanac" popped up in an online random word generator and a lightbulb went off for the writers. "The movie is fraught with sort of Easter eggs and secrets," said Deutschman. "One of which being that, in our head at least, the original people who started designing the blueprints were fans of time travel movies and decided to name it after something he was a fan of."

"This Is This Generation"

The setup to Project Almanac is this: David ( Jonny Weston ) is a nerdy kid who just got into MIT but can't afford it. On the search for something to help him win a scholarship, he and his sister Christina ( Ginny Gardner ) come upon their dead dad's blueprints for a project called "Almanac." Grabbing his friends Adam ( Allen Evangelista ) and Quinn ( Sam Lerner , above), David builds the machine and begins to test its boundaries. But, as kids tend to do, they take things too far.

That story is told wholly with found footage, a genre that certainly has a bad reputation. Israelite plans on using those conventions against type though. "I think there's a lot of potential in the medium," he said. "In taking it seriously and treating the audience with respect and treating the characters with respect in terms of 'Why is the camera really on? Where would the camera be when it is on?'" In the film, the camera passes between characters, get set on tables, and switches to Go-Pro view a lot.

Producer Brad Fuller also feels the found footage in Project Almanac gives the film a certain immediacy and connection to the younger generation. "I have a 19-year-old and a 16-year-old, there is nothing in my house that is private anymore," the producer said. "This is what these kids do. I mean, my dinner last night is on the Internet. You can go and see it. My son shot it, and it's right there. If Paramount didn't shut it down, my son would be making 500 Vines today. This is this generation. This is why I said I don't have to be cool but Dean is, because that's kind of the way the world is."

"This Is a Pivotal Scene"

That generation-specific feeling was on display while we were on set: day 21 of 28 days of shooting. Project Almanac had taken over a large grass area on a Bowen Property area on the west side of Atlanta. In the film, this scene is part of Lollapalooza. However, during filming, they didn't know which specific music festival they would use. So production designer Maher Ahmad researched all types of major music festivals to create multiple elements that could take place at any of them. There's the "Slippery Soak Supra Slide", a huge VIP tent, porta-potties, an umbrella that shoots down water, festival games, and a few hundred extras wearing badges for the fictional "Signal Field 2014 Music Fest." Very little of this will be seen in the movie, except the water slide, but it gave a great vibe.

The centerpiece of the set, and scene, is a massive blackboard with the phrase "Before the World Ends." There, festival attendees are invited to write about their desires and goals in all these bright, neon colors. It's a massive structure, probably stretching 100 yards long, reaching 8 feet high and it's been entirely filled out by the production. This is where David will first make his move on Jessie ( Sofia Black-D'Elia ) and screw it up, setting forth the events later. You can see a shot from the scene above.

'This is a pivotal scene," Israelite says "The protagonist is about to make his move on the girl and at the very last minute he is too scared to take the bull by the horns. That's been his problem the whole movie. So this is a scene where you feel that these two are finally going to come together and he blows it. It sets up the second half of the movie; about what he will have to do and places he will have to go and the rabbit hole he will have to go down in order to get the girl. All the moral compromises he will make to try and get that. "

Ditching class

After shooting a bunch of close-ups and action on the water slide, the production literally picks up its tents and moves to the other side of the field to shoot in front of the huge blackboard. Two rehearsals are run with Weston and Black-D'Elia (above), one with extras another without, then the master take of the scene takes three takes. These kids are pros.

What really stands out about this is not just the found footage elements and how much Israelite is thinking about the placement and reason for filming. It's also obvious these are kids who have stumbled upon time travel and are using it for dumb, pointless reasons. There's no reason to go back in time to splash around on a water slide, except that they can.

"Our main character has built this time machine with all of his friends, have gone on this journey of awesome stuff, winning the lottery, paying off their houses, just doing great cool shit and they miss this huge music festival," Israelite said. "They didn't have the money for it and now they get the opportunity to ditch class. They are all meant to be in chemistry right now. They ditch class and come to this huge music festival."

"Ghetto version" of time travel

That kind of fun, pointless aspect to time travel reflects itself through out the movie. First of all, they find the Project Almanac schematics but can't afford all of the equipment needed. So they build it from spare parts at Home Depot and their X-Boxes. "They don't have the money or the resources to build the machine that's laid out, so they have to provide their own ghetto version of the time machine," Israelite says. "That's why the time machine has limited power and will only take them back a few days and a few weeks, which I also think is cool about the movie. It's time travel, but you can only go back two days. So it's sort of like this high concept treated in a very low-fi way and so that logic applies to how they are building the machine as well."

This Is 2015 Time Travel

A "high concept" idea and "lo-fi execution" is exactly what the writers, producers, actors and director doing themselves. The movie is a reflection of the production and the story is reflection of the times. With Project Almanac , everyone has set out to make a time travel movie that's relatable yet entertaining and to do that it has to be current and kind of believable. No time travel movie is totally believable, but you at least believe these kids could have done these things with these resources. This is 2015 time travel in 2015, not 2015 time travel in 1989.

Project Almanac opens January 30.

• Entertainment
• Ryan Reynolds’ <i>The Adam Project</i> Should Be Fun, But It’s Sabotaged By Unwieldy Ambitions

Ryan Reynolds’ The Adam Project Should Be Fun, But It’s Sabotaged By Unwieldy Ambitions

S ome movies don’t have enough plot or excitement; others try to pack in so much that it’s a scramble just trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s hard to know exactly where The Adam Project, a futuristic fantasy and coming-of-age adventure-comedy starring Ryan Reynolds , falls. Is it way too much or not nearly enough? And where should we lay the blame for its flaws? (Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin, and Jennifer Flackett wrote the script; the director is Shawn Levy, the filmmaker behind the Night at the Museum movies and, more recently, the entertaining, if a bit manic, Free Guy , also starring Reynolds.) In places, The Adam Project drags interminably. But mostly it tries to do too many things at once, asserting that being a nerd can pay off, that time travel may not be all it’s cracked up to be, that dads should play ball with their sons, and that sons should be kind to their mothers—and that’s just a partial list. A movie with so many octopus ambitions is unlikely to pull off any of them, and that’s the bind The Adam Project finds itself in.

Reynolds plays Adam, a time-traveling fighter pilot from 2050 who crash-lands in the present day. His motives aren’t clear at first, and they become even murkier as the movie progresses. Apparently, he was really trying to go back a little further in time—to 2018—to change events that led to the death of his wife, Laura ( Zoe Saldana ). But later, his goal shifts toward changing the course of time travel at its very inception. (Or something.) Because as we come to learn, the rich, amoral corporate overlord Maya Sorian (played by Catherine Keener) has hijacked time-travel technology for her own nefarious purposes. It also turns out that Adam’s father ( Mark Ruffalo ) practically invented time travel. But then he died, leaving behind a widow ( Jennifer Garner ) and, of course, young Adam (played by Walker Scobell), a bright but unruly kid who keeps getting beaten up by the bullies at school.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Confused yet? Watching The Adam Project won’t help: minute by minute it wades deeper into its morass of excess. Then the special-effects kick in, including your usual time-travel zapping from here to there, as well as a phalanx of black-clad baddies who materialize out of nowhere. There are also two versions of Catherine Keener, one younger, in a CGI-buffed way, and one older—crazy! Garner, who plays the most sympathetic character in the whole film, disappears for long stretches. Whenever she re-emerges, The Adam Project breathes a little.

It’s a shame, because the film’s early moments—when young Adam first meets the older version of himself—show some promise. Reynolds has fantastic comic timing, and tends to play characters who are both insecure and have an inflated sense of their own importance in the world. His mildly pompous vibe is a plus, not a minus. He’s wonderful at playing characters who are just annoying enough—Reynolds will creep as close as he can to that line, pushing his luck every time. Just when you want to smack him, you’re likely to end up laughing instead. Scobell, as the young Adam, does a great job of matching Reynolds’ tics and mannerisms; it’s fun to watch these two together, the older Adam recognizing how terrifically annoying he was as a 12-year-old, even as the younger Adam—awkward and nerdy and angry at the world—marvels at the mere notion that he could grow up to be a time-traveling fighter pilot with a beautiful wife (and muscles to boot). But these two performers are undone by all the clutter around them. The Adam Project should be fun, but it’s sabotaged by its unwieldy ambitions. Forget the complexities of time travel, of wormholes and the laws of physics. This movie can barely get from point A to point B without tripping over itself.

Sign up for More to the Story , TIME’s weekly entertainment newsletter, to get the context you need for the pop culture you love.

More Must-Reads from TIME

• How Joe Biden Leads
• TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2024
• Javier Milei’s Radical Plan to Transform Argentina
• How Private Donors Shape Birth-Control Choices
• What Sealed Trump’s Fate : Column
• Are Walking Pads Worth It?
• 15 LGBTQ+ Books to Read for Pride
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

Screen Rant

The adam project's time travel rules & real science explained.

Your changes have been saved

Email Is sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Under Paris: Are There Really Sharks In The Seine?

Bad boys 4 rotten tomatoes audience score breaks major franchise record, brad pitt & george clooney’s new movie can fulfil the true potential of one tarantino story, 30 years later.

Warning! SPOILERS for The Adam Project.

The Adam Project  deploys the sci-fi narrative conceit of time travel - but how does it work? Directed by Shawn Levy, it stars Ryan Reynolds as Adam Reed, a time traveler from the year 2050 who returns to 2022 and meets his 12-year-old self. Young Adam is played by Walker Scobell alongside Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner who have reunited 18 years after 13 Going on 30 to play Adam's parents. The movie, which was released on Netflix on March 11, 2022, is the second feature that Shawn Levy has done with Ryan Reynolds after Free Guy . The duo will also team up again for Deadpool 3 , which still doesn't have a release date, but is set to officially bring the Merc with the Mouth to Marvel Studios.

In The Adam Project , Ryan Reynolds plays grown-up Adam Reed, who steals his time jet to return to 2018 in search of his wife Laura, played by Zoe Saldaña . Laura had jumped to 2018 to figure out an anomaly when her jet exploded, presumably killing her. Adam, however, believes she’s alive and goes after her. Accidentally landing in 2022, he meets his younger self and they learn to work together to help save Laura and heal from the trauma of losing their father. They also have to stop adult Adam's boss Sorian (Catherine Keener) from using time travel in a way that could have disastrous effects on the world, Biff-style.

Related:  Back To The Future's Time Travel Explained: How It Works & Is It Accurate?

Because it's a time travel movie, it has to contend with the problem of defining its time travel rules. In fiction, time travel is handled in different ways, depending on the rules of the fictional universe. The Avengers: Endgame version of time travel deals with branch timelines, which are created when a time traveler changes something in the past. The Back to the Future type of time travel, however, makes it so that a time traveler can change the future by changing the past. All of these time travel hypotheses have been proposed in real life when scientists consider the possible repercussions of time travel. Where exactly does The Adam Project fall in its time travel philosophy? Here’s how time travel works in the Ryan Reynolds flick.

Adam's Dad's Magnetic Particle Accelerator Explained

Adam’s dad, Louis (Ruffalo), is a quantum physicist and a professor who also works for a company owned by a woman named Maya Sorian. She funds his research and allows him to create a large particle accelerator in the facility. Particle accelerators exist in real life and have made headlines over the past decade or so, the most famous one being the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Accelerators use energy to speed up beams of particles and powerful magnets to direct and focus the particles. They have been used since the 1930s to investigate different aspects of particle physics.

In the movie, Louis creates the Adam Project , his magnetic particle accelerator, to investigate a hypothesis that they could “create utilitarian wormholes in space” using enough energy - that is, portals that could actually be used for travel across space and time. In real-life science, it has been hypothesized that black holes could be used to travel backward in time, but it would be a one-way trip - and a potentially deadly one. Black holes could potentially rip any person or vessel that tried to travel through them apart. The type of wormholes that Louis’s Adam Project collider creates also use a stabilizer algorithm called ISPCA (Infinitely Shifting Plasma Containing Algorithm) that allows for them to be used to travel across space-time without destroying the user.

Could Wormholes Be Used For Time Travel?

In theory, yes. In 1935, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen used the theory of general relativity to propose the existence of bridges through time that could be used to connect two different points in space-time. This is what’s known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge. Popular culture has used this theory to explain everything from intergalactic travel to time travel. In the MCU’s Thor , Jane Foster calls the Bifrost an Einstein-Rosen bridge , which is what the Asgardians use to travel between the nine realms. Real physicists have hypothesized about the potential of using wormholes to eventually make it possible to traverse between two points across the universe faster than the speed of light.

Related:  Every Song In The Adam Project

If time travel can be done, science suggests that wormholes could be the mechanism to make it possible, but perhaps only in one direction. The wormhole would have to be traversable, meaning a person would need to be able to pass through it unharmed. One theory suggests that, in order for a wormhole to be traversable, a substance with negative energy would have to exist. Physicists believe that it's possible to create such a substance, and that time travel might actually require less of it than previously believed. However, no known attempts to actually travel through time using wormholes have been made public.

Why The Adam Project Doesn't Use Alternate Timelines Or The Multiverse

When young Adam asks his older self if their meeting would create a potential branch timeline, he shuts the idea down immediately. In the world of The Adam Project , time travel works much more like it does in Back to the Future  -  whatever is changed in the past alters the future. That brings into question the existence of the multiverse, which adult Adam basically rejects. The reason that alternate timelines and the multiverse can't exist in this movie is that the plot would not work if they did. Adult Adam going back in time would not alter anything about the time that he came from and would instead create a branch timeline. The Adam Project 's plot relies on the ability to alter the past. Sorian couldn't have created the future that adult Adam came from if she wasn't able to effectively change her own past through time travel. Because this time travel theory uses fixed points, as well, there is likely only one timeline in which the characters exist. If there is a multiverse, it would remain unaffected by anything these time travelers do.

What Are The Adam Project's Fixed Points In Time?

In most time travel fiction, meeting your past self is a big no-no that can create all sorts of paradoxical trouble. For one thing, meeting his younger self should be creating new memories that flood his brain as soon as he does anything differently from what he remembers from 2022, the way Old Joe remembers everything Joe does in Looper . However, The Adam Project fixes the “new memories” problem by explaining fixed points, or where on the temporal stream a person is from. Adult Adam tells his younger self that the reason he doesn’t remember any of their encounter or the subsequent adventure they will have is that he isn’t in his correct time, yet. He explains that everyone only has one point in time where they belong and that his new memories won’t encode until he returns to 2050. Of course, none of that matters when the two Adams help their dad destroy time travel, effectively erasing the experience they had together.

How The Adam Project's Past Affects The Future

Changes to the past change the future, but remnants of the experience will still exist in the essence of someone's memory. Adam can't remember anything that he and his younger self are doing in the moment because he's not in his fixed point, but there's another way that the past affects the future. When Adam and his younger self finally meet up with his wife Laura in 2022, she reveals to them that Sorian has already traveled back in time to change the past, making a future that Adam says is like The Terminator on a good day , where she has universal control over time travel. Laura tells Adam that he has to go to 2018 to prevent his father from inventing time travel, but Adam doesn't want to because he's afraid they'll never meet. Laura, however, believes that everything they have ever done together will have already existed and that they will have enough of an inkling of those memories to find each other.

Related:  Free Guy Breaks Ryan Reynolds' Movie Formula (& That's Why It Works)

It turns out that Laura's hypothesis was correct. After both Adams go to 2018, they help their father steal back his algorithm, which then prevents time travel from ever being invented, sending them both back to their fixed times without any memory of those events. However, both characters fulfill promises they made before they stopped the invention of time travel. Young Adam remembers to give his mother a hug for adult Adam, and adult Adam finds Laura again. This suggests that time in The Adam Project exists on a loop, and that some remnants of every loop still exist even when the loop is altered. A time traveler can alter the way time will happen, but they cannot completely erase all traces of the original timeline.

More:  The Adam Project Ending Explained (In Detail)

• SR Originals
• The Adam Project (2022)

The Adam Project Ending Explained: Ryan Reynolds’ Time Travel Adventure, Unwound

Let's look at how the Adams saved the future.

Warning: spoilers for The Adam Project ending are in play. If you’re looking to avoid the twists and turns of this Netflix original, head over to another piece of non-spoiler content from CinemaBlend.

Teamed up for their second film together, director Shawn Levy and star Ryan Reynolds scored a heartfelt time travel adventure through The Adam Project . The latest original to join the library of movies on Netflix , there’s a lot of moving parts that might need some explanation after getting to the end of this funny, but sweet journey through the fourth dimension. Luckily, we happen to have the answers you crave, and we’re about to jump into the craziness that is The Adam Project’s tale of temporal tampering.  

This is your last chance to avoid spoilers, as even Christopher Lloyd could tell you that there’s no turning back the clock after we begin. (And in a sense, he actually did thanks to a fun ad he did with Ryan Reynolds .) If you want to keep your viewing experience fresh, but want to know a little more about The Adam Project , you can read our official review . Otherwise, sticking around from this point forward will divulge many secrets, starting with what happened at the end of the movie.

What Happened At The End Of The Adam Project?

2018 is a more important year than you’d think, thanks to The Adam Project . Unknown to the world at large, it’s the year that two versions of Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds/Walker Scobell) teamed up with their dad Louis ( Mark Ruffalo , in a casting move that makes total sense ) to save the world. As Louis has just accidentally invented time travel, the boys slip back to this very year to correct that supposed error in history, and do so with flying colors. After destroying the only copy of the algorithm that makes time travel possible, in a manner befitting of an explosive blockbuster, the two Adams and their father play catch. 

It would be their final moment together, as both Adams have to return to their corrected timelines, with Louis destined to die not too long after the moment they’re currently sharing. Thanks to the catharsis of one final adventure with dad, Younger Adam learns to go easier on his poor mother, Ellie ( Jennifer Garner ), and Older Adam continues through to his much brighter future, where he meets his beloved wife Laura ( Zoe Saldana ). 

How The Adam Project’s Future Originally Turned Out So Grim

The events of The Adam Project weren’t always so rosy. By time the movie opens in an altered 2050, Maya Sorian ( Catherine Keener ) is the most powerful person in the future. She managed to do this through, among other things, cornering the market on time travel; much like Ron Silver did in the 1994 time travel classic Timecop . With Laura presumed dead at Maya’s hand, Older Adam Reed takes matters into his own hands to correct the past.

Stealing a time jet, Adam intended to jump back to 2018, and enlist his father Louis to help him restore the future. Of course, The Adam Project throws in an added wrench of Older Adam accidentally landing in 2022, which then sees him recruiting his younger self to join the fight. Though he's not the only future defender trying to protect the timeline from the past. 

CINEMABLEND NEWSLETTER

Your Daily Blend of Entertainment News

In a bittersweet twist, we find out that Laura is actually alive and well after her supposedly fatal trip to 2018. Hiding out in hopes of correcting history for the better, she and Adam are reunited in 2022, but only for a brief moment. Sacrificing herself so that both Adams can travel back to 2018 themselves, Adam loses his wife again, with the hope that they'll still meet on the corrected timeline. 

The Key Events Of The Adam Project That Needed To Change

In the long run, a whole bunch of things need to change in The Adam Project’s skewed timeline. Most importantly, all of Maya Sorian’s scheming and influencing needs to be undone, and there’s a lot of pieces to that puzzle. In order to collapse Maya’s empire, scores of illegal financial dealings and policy making need to be prevented.

Of course, there’s one easy way to wipe all of these misdeeds off the map: erase time travel from the timeline. The one key event that needs to be altered above all others is The Adam Project’s accidental invention of time travel, which means Louis’s algorithm needs to be lost before the government or Maya can even begin to capitalize on it. So long as time travel exists, it can be abused to reap ill gotten gains. 

Why Maya Changed The Original Timeline (And The Consequences)

What drove The Adam Project’s villain to try and take over the world? In a word: legacy. As we learn when Older Maya is monologuing with her younger self, Maya Sorian is consigned to obscurity in the history of time travel. The government allegedly gets their hands on it, and her lonely lifestyle of long hours and isolation were all for nothing. If Sorian is going to sacrifice her life in the name of time travel, shouldn't she at least get something out of it? 

Older Maya travels back to 2018, gives Younger Maya the tips and tricks she needs to build an empire, while ruining the world in the process. The consequences are a vastly altered timeline that stems from The Adam Project’s earliest point in time and throughout the rest of the film. Though as an added bonus, the impulsive nature of Older Maya deletes her own existence from the timeline overall.

In her attempt to kill Younger Adam, erasing him from time itself, Older Maya accidentally kills Younger Maya with the bullet she intended for her young target. The bullet then continues to damage the particle accelerator that helped accidentally introduce the world of The Adam Project to time travel, eventually resulting in the destruction of the lab Maya and Louis Reed were working in. Time travel is officially dead, Maya Sorian no longer exists, and time can now play out as it’s originally intended to.

Could Adam Have Saved His Father?

Some might be wondering if The Adam Project left the door open for Louis Reed’s life to be spared. With his fatal automobile accident occurring after the window into 2018 our heroes travelled back to, some could argue that this was an event that took place in the tangent timeline. Not to mention, the way that the story was winding up in the later acts, it almost felt like there was going to be a twist where Maya Sorian killed Louis to take control of time travel.

That’s not the case, as Louis Reed’s death seems like an accident that was always supposed to happen. Were this moment to have never happened, the characters and the story of The Adam Project would lack the personal growth we see both Adams undertake. Processing their shared trauma, Adam Reed understands that he has to cherish those he loves while they’re still in his life. 

Older Adam Reed learns from his mistakes, and creates a better life where he appreciates his mother and his younger self. By the time he meets his wife to be Laura, the traumatic events of their original future are forgotten, and they get to have a fresh start in a shiny new timeline. The Adam Project is no more, but after seeing what the results entailed, it’s for the best.

If you’ve somehow read this entire ending breakdown without seeing the movie, or if you want to run through this exciting adventure all over again, The Adam Project is available to be streamed by Netflix subscribers far and wide. For those of you who don’t mind a peek into the future, feel free to head over to the 2022 Netflix movie schedule . There’s plenty of new thrills headed our way in the year to come, and this is the sort of knowledge that won’t screw up the spacetime continuum. 

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

Inside Out's Amy Poehler Revealed Who Would Voice Joy In Her Head, And It's The Best Choice Ever

Fans Are Just Learning About Reese Witherspoon’s Real Name, And They Have So Many Thoughts

Colin Jost And Pete Davidson's Infamous Staten Island Ferry Has Become An Eyesore For Locals: 'It Belongs On The Scrap Yard'

Most Popular

• 2 Inside Out's Amy Poehler Revealed Who Would Voice Joy In Her Head, And It's The Best Choice Ever
• 3 Pat Sajak's Farewell To Wheel Of Fortune Fans Has Me Even More Strung Up In My Feels Than Vanna White's Tribute
• 4 90 Day Fiancé's Stephanie Matto Calls Out One Spinoff For Reportedly Faking Storylines
• 5 Fans Are Just Learning About Reese Witherspoon’s Real Name, And They Have So Many Thoughts

How does time travel work in The Adam Project? We explain all

We break down just how Ryan Reynolds can go back in time in The Adam Project

The Adam Project is a sci-fi extravaganza, with enough timeline hopping to make your head spin. But how exactly does time travel work in the movie? The answer is actually fairly complicated.

The film sees Ryan Reynolds' Adam travel back in time on the trail of his missing wife, Laura (Zoe Saldaña). He ends up meeting his younger self (played by Walker Scobell), and eventually both Adams must go back in time again to find their late father, Louis (Mark Ruffalo), and get his help stopping the villainous Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener).

With all the sci-fi buzzwords being thrown around – magnetic particle accelerator, wormholes, and fixed time talk abounds – it can be hard to keep track of the logic behind everything that's going on. But that's where we come in. We've broken down exactly how time travel works in The Adam Project to explain all. Major spoilers ahead!

How does time travel work in The Adam Project?

The characters in the film use time jets – fancy planes, basically – to go back and forth in time. They fire a portal, and then the pilot can glide right through into the year of their choice.

But how did science get to that point? Well, that's all thanks to Adam's dad, Louis. As he explains to his sons, he theorized that "with a powerful enough pulse, we could generate utilitarian wormholes in space." Put simply, that's the portals. 

To generate that pulse, though, a massive machine is needed. That's what the Adam Project is – a huge magnetic particle accelerator. It goes online in 2018, which eventually leads to time travel becoming a reality. The project is then destroyed in 2018, too, when the Adams go back to stop Sorian.

That's not all there is to it, though. There's also an algorithm developed by Louis to stabilize the worm holes: ISPCA (Infinitely Shifting Plasma Containing Algorithm). The equation is kept on a hard drive within the accelerator, and is the key to time travel. Once that's gone, so is the ability to travel along the timeline.

Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter

Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more

What does fixed time mean in The Adam Project?

You might be thinking a plot hole is opened up by Adam meeting his younger self, though. Since Big Adam has met himself as a child, shouldn't he remember everything that happens next, since it's technically already happened for him? Young Adam is experiencing everything at Big Adam's side, after all, which means Big Adam should have those same memories. 

Luckily, though, there's an explanation for why that's not the case. As Big Adam explains, everyone has only one point in time where they belong on a quantum level – so, an anchor point on the timeline. It's only when a person returns to that point that their memories will change, so Big Adam won't have any recollection of his adventure from his younger self's point of view until he's back in 2050.

Can the timeline be changed in The Adam Project?

As for changing the timeline, The Adam Project is more Back to the Future than Avengers: Endgame in that regard. Anything that a time traveler does in the past can affect the future, which is why Sorian is just so dangerous. She goes back to give her past self tips on accumulating her fortune, and clears the way for her to gain control of time travel in 2050. 

That means Sorian has changed the whole future already by the time the movie starts – and, as Adam tells his younger counterpart, 2050 is like The Terminator on a good day. So, very bad. 

How much of that is down to Sorian is left to our imaginations, but we're betting she's not at all innocent. By destroying time travel in the past, though, the Adams and Louis have hopefully built a brighter future for everyone. 

The Adam Project is streaming on Netflix now. If you're all caught up, check out our guide to The Adam Project ending explained for an even deeper dive on the movie, and see our guide to the best Netflix movies to plan your next movie marathon.

I'm an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering all things film and TV for the site's Total Film and SFX sections. I previously worked on the Disney magazines team at Immediate Media, and also wrote on the CBeebies, MEGA!, and Star Wars Galaxy titles after graduating with a BA in English. 

Godzilla Minus One fans slam Netflix's English dub for changing one of the movie's "most impactful" lines

Stephen King shares his verdict on Netflix's new number one movie

Vampire Miles Morales attacks Doctor Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum in Blood Hunt #3 preview

Most Popular

• 2 The Rogue Prince of Persia Review: "a roguelite with few fresh ideas that's mainly being propped up by its slick combat"
• 3 Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 review: "Nothing short of video game sorcery"
• 4 Lorelei and the Laser Eyes review: "Totally engrossing, effortlessly stylish, and one of the best puzzle games of 2024"
• 5 Dune: Imperium - Uprising review - "An elegant mix"
• 2 Bad Boys: Ride or Die review – "Will Smith and Martin Lawrence have enough charisma to see this fourquel through"
• 3 Young Woman and the Sea review: "Daisy Ridley pulls off this handsome biopic with style"
• 4 Sasquatch Sunset review: "An eccentric concept makes for the best Bigfoot film yet"
• 5 The Beast review: "An elegant but ultimately unwieldy sci-fi drama”
• 2 Doctor Who season 1, episode 6 review: "Loki's Kate Herron works her magic on Bridgerton-esque episode 'Rogue'"
• 3 Star Trek: Discovery season 5 review - "A spectacular but uneven final voyage"
• 4 Doctor Who season 1, episode 5 review: "'Dot and Bubble' is like a family-friendly Black Mirror"
• 5 Doctor Who season 1, episode 4 review: "A horror tour de force that will stay with you for years to come"

• These Time Travel Movies Ar...
• Underrated Time-Travel Horr...
• Horror Movies About Time Tr...
• Top Current Shows About Tim...
• Unforgettable Time Travelin...
• All About the Montauk Project
• John Litor, a Real Time Tra...
• Pictures of Real Time Trave...
• Wild, True Stories About Ti...
• Totally Convincing True Sto...
• Real People Who Time Traveled
• Which Method Would You Use?
• Sudden Time Jumps in Movies
• Fan Theories About 'Back to...
• Film Plot Holes You'll Neve...

• Sony Pictures Releasing
• TriStar Pictures

The Best Time Travel Movies On Netflix To Watch

Vote up your favorite time travel movies currently streaming on Netflix.

When you want to watch a time travel movie, it's only natural that you'd turn to a streamer, and there are always some truly great time travel movies on Netflix. Not quite a genre, the time travel film is more of a sub-sub-genre within science fiction, and Netflix has an odd array of movies that add time travel into body-swap stories, romantic comedies, indie thrillers, and even serious dramas.

Even just among Netflix Originals, you'll find movies as different as The Adam Project (a Spielberg-inspired adventure starring Ryan Reynolds as a time-traveling future pilot) and When We First Met (a romcom in which Adam DeVine uses a time traveling photo booth to seduce Alexandra Daddario). That's not even counting established heavy hitters and deep cuts among Netflix's time traveling movies .

With so many options, a temporally curious viewer can use the help this list offers. Folks just like you are voting up the finest Netflix time travel movies, so you can rest assured that they'll lead you in the right direction. You've got your Netflix, your popcorn, and even an ice cold soda. Now let this list help you pick that final element of movie night.

This sci-fi thriller directed by Rian Johnson,is all about Joe, a "Looper" who assassinates people sent from the future. It's a steady job, until his next target turns out to be his older self. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis play the younger and older Joe, respectively, and their already dangerous relationship grows even more ominous when young Joe encounters a self reliant mother, played by Emily Blunt, and her mysterious, off-putting young son.

13 Going on 30

This romantic comedy (with a dollop of fantasy) directed by Gary Winick revolves around Jenna, a 13-year-old girl who makes a wish to be "thirty, flirty, and thriving," and wakes up the next day as a 30-year-old woman. Unlike many body-swap movies, this one actually jumps forward in time from 1987 to 2004, making it a body-swap-time-travel film. Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo play the older Jenna and her childhood best friend Matt, who has grown into a man the old fashioned way while Jenna was leaping ahead via whimsical time travel.

The Adam Project

This '80s-flavored sci-fi drama directed by Shawn Levy rides shotgun with Adam Reed, a fighter pilot from a dystopian 2050 traveling back in time to prevent his wife Laura's murder. Ryan Reynolds stars as the older Adam, with Isaiah Haegert and Walker Scobell as the 8 and 12-year-old versions of himself with whom Adam teams up. In addition to altering the past on behalf of his future/past wife, the mini-generations of Adam also gets to revisit his mother and father, played by Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo.

Galaxy Quest

A very, very Star Trek -ish comedy directed by Dean Parisot, Galaxy Quest follows the cast of a defunct sci-fi TV show led by Tim Allen as Jason Nesmith as Commander Peter Quincy Taggart, who become real-life heroes when they are whisked away by actual aliens who believe the show was an all-facts historical document. Nesmith's crew includes Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver), Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman), Fred Kwan (Tony Shalhoub), and Tommy Webber (Daryl Mitchell), who must play their parts to save a naive alien race from war. Sam Rockwell steals the show too. Time travel has a small but pivotal role thanks to the  "Omega 13," a device that reverses time by 13 seconds, allowing Nesmith a second chance to save the day.

Hot Tub Time Machine

A party comedy (with science fiction as an excuse for time travel shenanigans) directed by Steve Pink, this one centers around a group of disillusioned friends - Adam, Lou, Nick, and Jacob, portrayed by John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke - who unwittingly travel back to the 1980s through a malfunctioning hot tub. Trapped in the past and afraid of altering their future, the quartet (one of whom hadn't been born in the ‘80s) have a good time and confront the choices that have defined their adulthoods. Also Crispin Glover has a ball as a bellhop with one arm wrapped around destiny’s shoulders.

When We First Met

Directed by Ari Sandel, this romantic comedy with a splash of sci-fi focuses on Noah, played by Adam Devine, who discovers a magical photo booth that sends him back in time to the day he met Avery, a woman he's convinced is the only one for him, despite her engagement to another man. Alexandra Daddario plays Avery, the object of Noah's affection, who sees him only as a friend even as he hops back in time throughout the 2010s attempting to make her fall in love with him. Butterfly effect consequences with a funny slant ensue.

This sci-fi drama directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead follows two New Orleans paramedics who encounter a series of bizarre, gruesome deaths linked to a mysterious new drug called Synchronic, which messes with users' place in time, sending young users traveling into the past and allowing grown ups to observe different times. Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan star as Steve and Dennis, the paramedics whose friendship and lives are upended by Steve's investigations into the drug's origins and the sudden disappearance of Dennis's daughter.

In the Shadow of the Moon

This noir thriller with sci-fi elements directed by Jim Mickle, is the story of Thomas Lockhart, a determined Philadelphia detective, played by Boyd Holbrook, who becomes obsessed with a case that spans decades. Lockhart's pursuit begins in 1988 when he first encounters a serial killer, played by Cleopatra Coleman, whose crimes not only predict the future but also occur with inexplicable regularity every nine years. As the narrative unfolds, the killer's motives and the mysterious role of time travel become clearer, propelling Lockhart through a temporal chase that defies the linear nature of time.

See You Yesterday

This sci-fi drama, directed by Stefon Bristol and produced by Spike Lee, tells the gripping story of high school prodigies, Claudette "C.J." Walker and Sebastian Thomas, who invent backpacks that allow them to travel through time. Eden Duncan-Smith and Dante Crichlow play the duo, whose ambitions take a tragic turn when they use their invention to prevent the wrongful police shooting of C.J.'s brother, Calvin. 

• Time Travel

As they say in well-written scripts, "You mean... like time travel?" + also a few bizarre stories about real people who have claimed, despite every law of physics, they have traveled through time.

• Movies & TV
• Big on the Internet
• About Us & Contact

The Time Travel and Ending of ‘The Adam Project’ Explained

Ryan Reynolds’ latest film, The Adam Project , was released on Netflix this week, and it’s such a fun and touching time travel adventure. Directed by Shawn Levy, the film boasts an all-star cast including Reynolds, Jennifer Garner, Zoe Saldaña , Mark Ruffalo, and Catherine Keener. There’s also a breakout performance from 13-year-old Walker Scobell , who channeled Reynolds exceptionally well in his role.

The plot follows Adam Reed (Reynolds), a time traveler from 2050, headed to 2018 to save his wife . However, he mistakenly lands himself in 2022 and meets the mouthy 12-year-old version of himself (Scobell). His younger self is struggling after losing his father in a car accident. Badly injured, Reed reluctantly accepts his younger self’s help. But their mission changes from saving Reed’s wife, to saving the whole world (by ensuring Reed’s father never invents time travel).

While the film has been praised for its performances, visuals, and premise, some viewers may be confused by the ending. This is a pretty natural occurrence when it comes to films that tackle time travel. Nearly every film from Avengers: Endgame to Predestination has its own set of time travel rules. The Adam Project is no exception. Obviously, *spoilers ahead * for The Adam Project.

How time travel works in The Adam Project

The Adam Project takes place across 3 different time periods: 2022, 2018, and 2050. In 2022, future Reed quickly relays the first rules of time travel to his younger self. Naturally, young Reed asks the question the audience is wondering, why doesn’t the older Reed remember meeting his past self, and therefore, why doesn’t he know everything that happens? The older Reed explains this is because of ‘fixed time.’ Essentially, every person has just one place in time where they belong on a quantum level. Older Reed’s fixed time is 2050, thus, his memories won’t reform and reconcile until he returns to his fixed time. It’s a pretty nifty (and surprisingly simple) explanation. When older Reed gets to his own time period, then time (and his memories) will change. Until then, he’s in the dark like everyone else.

Older Reed then fills in the younger Reed on what’s happening in the future, and how time travel plays into it. Reed crash-landed in 2022 because he was being pursued by Maya Sorian (Keener), the leader in the future (which has become a dystopian, apocalyptic nightmare). Life in 2050 is described as, kind of like the world in Terminator , but even that world would be 2050 “on a good day.”

Even with things as bad as they are, at first, older Reed has no intention of correcting the future—he was attempting to get to 2018, because his wife, Laura (Saldaña) , time traveled there, and he was told she died in a crash. He doesn’t believe it though. And he’s proved right when Laura finds the older and younger Reeds in 2022 (after Sorian attacks them) and reveals she got stuck in the past after escaping an assassination attempt in 2018.

Here’s where it gets slightly more complicated. There’s a general code of ethics with time travel in the world of this film. You’re not supposed to significantly change the future. But what Laura found out (and the reason Sorian tried to murder her) is that Sorian changed the fixed timeline, well before the events of the movie, and to her own personal gain. See, Reed’s dad, Louis (Mark Ruffalo), came up with the technology that allowed time travel in the past. Sorian was his business partner, and in the original timeline, the tech was never used again after Louis’ death. But Sorian went back in time to 2018 and gave her younger self the information to alter the course of history. This led to her controlling time travel (and the world) in 2050. Laura now knows that if they stop this event, they can reset the future to how it was supposed to be. She urges the Reeds to make a time jump into 2018 to stop Sorian. It will mean she and Reynolds never meet (they met as time travel pilots in school), but it’s a sacrifice they’ll have to make.

How does The Adam Project end?

Back in 2022, Laura is killed by Sorian while giving the Reeds time to escape to 2018. The Reeds then meet their father, Louis, before his death. Their goal is to destroy his time travel tech, thus, making Sorian’s dystopian future impossible. They aren’t supposed to tell their father who they are (time travel ethics and all that), but he immediately knows Reynolds is his adult son, and they tell him the whole deal. So much for not making waves.

Louis initially refuses to help, but eventually, has a change of heart. The Reeds and Louis go to Sorian Technology to destroy a hard drive that’s vital for Louis’ particle accelerator. There, they are confronted by the older and younger Sorians and their henchmen. A massive battle leads to the particle accelerator being damaged, overloading, and releasing a massive magnetic field. When older Sorian attempts to shoot Louis, the magnetic field changes the direction of the bullet, killing younger Sorian instead. The older Sorian disappears. And Louis and the Reeds escape the building before the particle accelerator explodes. With Sorian dead, and the particle accelerator destroyed, time travel is never created, and the grim future of 2050 is unwound.

The Adam’s Project ending explained

While time travel is never created, the Reeds don’t alter other aspects of the timeline. Louis is adamant that the Reeds don’t tell him how he died, as that could potentially save him. Hence, Louis does still die in a car accident and is still deceased when the Reeds return to their timelines. However, he seems able to accept his passing with peacefulness and acceptance. He has one last moment with both versions of his sons—where they play catch. It’s pretty adorable.

But here’s where it gets a little dicey, rule-wise. Time has been reset for both Adam Reeds. Time travel was never invented, and therefore, they never could have met or had the whole adventure. But before they go back to their futures, older Adam urges his younger self to hold something inside of him, even though he won’t remember. Be kinder to their mother or he’ll regret it later. So, while the Reeds have learned to let go of their bitterness over their father’s death in the movie, they also seem to carry a piece of that when they go back to their timelines. Instead of just being snarky to his mother, like he was in the beginning of the movie, we see younger Reed hug his overwhelmed and grieving mother at the end. We’re left to understand that the events left a trace of themselves in younger Reed on a cosmic level, even though technically, he should have no knowledge of them.

The final scene of the film occurs years after the young Reed’s adventure. Older Reed is in college and he meets Laura, in the exact same manner he had described to his younger self in 2022. This last scene is meant to confirm that even though time travel doesn’t exist, and the future is altered, Reed and Laura do still meet. The two were always meant to be together, regardless of time travel, ending the film on a sweet note. Perhaps it isn’t just timelines that are fixed in this universe, maybe, like in the Doctor Who rules , some momentous events and feelings can never change.

(featured image: Netflix)

15 Amazing Time Travel Movies and Where to Stream Them

I f you have ever wondered what it would be like to turn back time or experience the future, these amazing time travel movies will transport you to that exact scenario. Whether from the comedy, action, or science fiction genres, these stories look at the possibility of time travel and how it could impact our lives as humans.

Take a look at our list of movies where the past and the future seem so easy to travel, where danger and comedy are around each corner — and where time has no boundaries.

15. Time After Time (1979) – Prime Video

Malcolm McDowell plays the iconic H.G. Wells in our next pick for best time travel movies where he builds a time machine to travel to a paradise of the future. Unfortunately, Jack the Ripper (David Warner), has other plans for the machine as he uses it to travel to the late 1970s to escape capture from the police. And so Wells follows and asks the help of a banker to stop Jack from bringing terror to a new era.

This film is a lesser-known, but still brilliantly clever, picture about saving the future.

14. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) – Apple TV

Many teenage girls probably wish they could turn back the clock to a particular moment where they could do something better. Maybe it’s because of a test or talking to a crush, but we’ve all been there.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a Japanese animated film about a girl who has such powers and is able to redo the day over and over until she gets it just right. However, as she starts experiencing more tragic events, she learns that time travel can have its drawbacks.

13. Twelve Monkeys (1995) – Hulu

Twelve Monkeys is psychological and mind-melting. Don’t confuse the 2015 TV show 12 Monkeys with this Terry Gilliam directed sci-fi flick. Granted, they are based on the same short movie made in the 60s. Which means they share the same setting, mission, and time travel theme. Yet, the rest is different. Especially because the movie stars Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Madeline Stowe, and Christopher Plummer.

The best thing about Twelve Monkeys is that Gilliam’s bizarre film style comes across clearly. It is very unique as it digs into the psychological aspects of time travel that most movies do not. Definitely give this movie a try on Hulu.

12. Star Trek VI: The Voyage Home (1986) – Paramount Plus

To save the universe, Captain Kirk and his crew of the Starship Enterprise must travel back in time to the 1980s and bring back a whale they can use to speak with an unknown life form that will destroy everything if it can’t speak with someone who knows whale-speak.

This movie offers a strange premise, but you can’t help enjoy watching this starship crew become accustomed to 1980s California where they discover everything from the use of currency to computers. This is easily one of the most charming and hilarious entries of the original Star Trek crew .

ALSO READ: 10 Best Space Documentaries Streaming Now

11. Meet the Robinsons (2007) – Disney Plus

Meet the Robinsons is definitely one of the zippiest Disney animated features. Lewis is a boy genius who may be smart enough to develop amazing inventions but he’s not quite ready for his family of the future when he travels forward in time to meet all of them.

Not only are his future relatives a chaotic assortment of odd and quirky individuals but Lewis will also have to contend with dinosaurs, an evil man in a bowler hat who wants to steal his inventions, and even a frightening future where hats control the world.

10. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) – Prime Video

California teenage slackers Bill and Ted are more interested in their band of Wild Stallions than their overdue history report. But then a time-traveler by the name of Rufus, traveling through time in a phone booth, gives this inept duo a chance to experience history more personally.

Bill and Ted will traverse time and meet famous figures to deliver what will be both an enlightening report and an amazing rock performance. This is such a fun and entertaining time travel movie that you should add to your Prime watchlist.

9. The Butterfly Effect (2004) – Prime Video

In The Butterfly Effect , Evan (played by Ashton Kutcher) suffers from memory loss where he blacks out and can’t remember certain points in time. It turns out that he must travel back to fill in those gaps and try to fix his past mistakes. But, like many of the best time travel movies, going back can cause other problems with the present day and he can’t risk making anything worse. Especially because the love of his life, Kayleigh, needs saving.

8. Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) – Netflix

Hot Tub Time Machine had to make it on our list of amazing time travel movies because of its hilarious premise and stacked cast. Four young guys including three friends and one nephew travel to a winter resort to escape, relax, and help Lou address his struggles with suicidal thoughts and alcohol head on. But when they jump in the hot tub, it takes them back to one night in 1986 that happened to be a pivotal moment for everyone involved. Except for their friend’s nephew who hasn’t been born yet. They can’t do too many things differently, even if they want to, or they risk him never being born.

Check out this hilarious movie starring John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke that led to a huge following and even a sequel.

7. Tenet (2020) – Prime Video

Tenet was a big sci-fi film in 2020 and truly bends the concept of time in a way that has not been seen in other movies on this list. John David Washington plays “The Protagonist,” which is the only name he knows as a CIA operative ready to stop World War III. Tenet is the mysterious international organization that hires him to seek out dangers to the human race, but time is ticking and he must use time travel to his advantage.

CHECK OUT: 12 Best Stanley Kubrick Movies Worth Streaming Today

6. The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009) – Prime Video

In this story, time travel becomes involuntary causing more problems than good, especially when it comes to love and relationships. The Time Traveler’s Wife depicts Henry (played by Eric Bana) who has a condition in which he travels back and forth through time, but never knows when these moments will happen. This leads him to seemingly disappear and he also forgets some of his past memories. As a result, his wife, Clare (Rachel McAdams), struggles to feel secure in their relationship and keep their lives on the same path.

5. About Time (2013) – Prime Video

Interestingly, our next movie recommendation about time travel features actress Rachel McAdams yet again. This romantic comedy came about by the same creators as Love Actually , so that should set the tone for the funny moments and heart wrenching stories to come.

Tim is an awkward man who struggles to find love when on his 21st birthday, he is told by his father that the men in their family can travel through time. He uses it to his advantage to make things go right with his crush, Mary. However, he soon learns that while he can always go backwards, he has to wait to see how the future plays out just like everyone else.

4. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) – Max

The Harry Potter stories often play around with many different forms of fantasy and magic, from levitation to defense against the dark arts. So, it is only natural that one of them made it on our top time travel movies list.

The Prisoner of Azkaban , the third book and film in the series, features the third act surprise of tinkering with time to change events and reshape the magical world, as well as furthering Harry’s growth as a wise and powerful wizard in the making.

3. Flight of the Navigator (1986) – Disney Plus

David is a 12-year-old boy in 1978, but he awakens to discover he has been sent into the 1980s where his parents are more wrinkly, his little brother is bigger, and the government doesn’t know how to explain such an event. How could David turn up after all these years not looking a day over twelve? Seeking answers, David discovers a mysterious alien spaceship with a quirky robot computer that may be able to help him get back to his own time.

Featuring plenty of astounding special effects and great amazement for both the sci-fi ship and the 1980s, Flight of the Navigator has a gentle and hilarious approach to one kid’s wild adventure.

2. Groundhog Day (1990) – Netflix

Bill Murray plays a reporter that finds himself repeating the same day over and over and over again. No matter where he goes or what he does, every day ends with him waking up the next to the same tune on the radio and the same people doing the same things.

There’s a reason why this film’s format of being trapped in time has become a common reference for more modern films. It’s just that good and became an instant classic. Most of it comes down to a stellar direction by Harold Ramis , who also directed Ghostbusters , and the incredible performance by Bill Murray.

1. Back to the Future (1985) – Peacock

If looking for the best time travel movies, you can, of course, stop at Back to the Future . This is a timeless classic that seems to get better with age. Teenager Marty McFly finds himself sent back to the 50s and must find his way back to his own time. But, he also realizes that he must ensure the teenage versions of his mother and father still hook up or else, he won’t exist or return to his former life.

Aside from being a stellar time-travel trilogy, the first film is a supremely iconic adventure and an empathetic story where a teen begins to relate to their parents’ struggles.

What is time travel in movies?

Time travel can be depicted in many ways on screen. Some of the movies on our list show it in a funny and romantic way whereas others demonstrate the consequences that can come from going back in time and making changes.

Usually, the plot surrounds a person or multiple people who travel back in time to a pivotal moment and attempt to change the past without ruining their present future.

What movie repeats over and over?

There are a couple of films that show certain moments in time or days repeating over and over again. However, the most famous example of a day that repeats itself is Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray.

What is the 80 time travel movie?

The most well-known and beloved 80s time travel movie is Back to the Future , which happens to be the top movie on our ranking list. The movie represents the 80s as present day and also goes back in time to the 50s.

Has anyone ever experienced a time loop?

It is said that in real life, people have experienced time loops or déjà vu. This can be caused by the mind due to anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other reasons. However, these time travel movies do not tend to address mental health, but rather the consequences of our desire to go back in time.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to time travel, the closest we’ll get is by watching people experiencing the phenomenon through film. Whether it’s a comedic story like Hot Tub Time Machine and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure or a highly intense opportunity to save the world like in Tenet , these movies teach us a lot about moving forward with what we’re given. They are undoubtedly entertaining with various messages, so it’s definitely worth checking out this topic on screen.

My Science Project

1 HOUR 34 MINS

Science fiction.

A high school student and his girlfriend raid a military junkyard and happen upon a time-travel contraption from a UFO, which he uses unwittingly to power his science fair project.

Movie Trailer

Cast & Crew

John Stockwell Michael Harlan

Danielle von Zerneck Ellie Sawyer

Fisher Stevens Vince Latello

Raphael Sbarge Sherman

Dennis Hopper Bob Roberts

Barry Corbin Lew Harlan

Richard Masur Detective Isadore Nulty

Where to Stream

Upcoming TV Airings

The airings below are based on a generic national schedule. Times and dates can vary by TV provider.

Sunday, June 9

Teens (John Stockwell, Danielle von Zerneck) find time machine in military junkyard.

Friday, June 14

Saturday, june 15, sunday, june 23, benefits to registering & following.

(It's free!)