The Adam Project: A Visual Effects-Heavy Pile of Exposition

Netflix appears to be in the business of creating very expensive original content that manages to fall flat, even in the face of massive casts and effects budgets that rival major theatrical releases. The Adam Project manages to continue this trend, delivering a movie with above average science fiction visuals at times, but a boring plot and characters that are almost entirely designed to exposit the key science nonsense that fuels the plot.

It’s probably best to get the good parts of the movie out of the way before discussing the issues that plague it. The cast is all huge names who are not strangers to delivering long diatribes of pseudo-science. Ryan Reynolds leads the cast and is supported by Jennifer Gardner, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, and Catherine Keener. They do try their best, but the movie is so convoluted that even the scenes designed to have emotional impact end up being just expanded vessels of exposition. The movie also has impressive visuals for time machines, space ships, and other mainstays of the genre that are unique when compared to other movies and television with similar ideas.

Then comes the main issue with the movie, an issue that makes the movie the cinematic equivalent of a homework assignment. The plot is needlessly convoluted for a story that can be summed up with the sentence “a time traveler has to team up with his younger self to save the future.” Then there are scenes about his mother’s dating life, older Adam reuniting with his wife, and other plot points that go nowhere that are pretty obviously just there to pad the runtime, which clocks in at just about one hour and 45 minutes. Compound this with the misguided belief that the general moviegoing audience at this point needs a detailed explanation as to the various theories about how time travel works (which can at this point be described as “Back to the Future-style or Star Trek-style time travel rules” without losing the vast majority of audience members), and the movie is just a lengthy exorcise in delivering exposition.

The easiest path to creating a watchable movie within the science fiction genre is to think of it as a negative relationship on a graph. The more time that needs to be spent explaining semantic parts of the science, the simpler the plot should be. Thinking back to science fiction movies that have become classics in the past, if the science is hard to understand, the movie has a simple plot and if the science is easy to understand, the movie has more room to play with complex narratives. The Adam Project ultimately fails because it takes a simple scientific concept (within the prism of fiction) and blows it out of proportion to the point that the plot is almost completely lost.

For those who are interested in watching The Adam Project, it is available to stream on Netflix. If someone is just interested in seeing how director Shawn Levy works with Ryan Reynolds before they work together again on Deadpool 3, they should check out Free Guy on Disney+ and HBOMax. It is a far better use of time to watch that movie over The Adam Project.

Final Rating: 6.5/10