Review | Netflix movie review: The Adam Project – Ryan Reynolds meets his younger self in time-travel family drama
- Reynolds plays Adam Reed, who returns from the future to destroy time-travel research and meets his younger self. A love-hate relationship quickly develops
- The plot becomes strained at times but an appearance by Adam’s father, who died when he was a child, brings tears to the eyes. This is a warm hug of a movie
3.5/5 stars
A caption opens Shawn Levy’s The Adam Project. “Time travel exists. You just don’t know it yet,” it reads. The year – briefly – is 2050, and we join Ryan Reynolds’ Adam Reed in a spacecraft that soon zooms its way through a wormhole.
He arrives back in 2022, and right into the world of his younger self (newcomer Walker Scobell). The adolescent Adam lives with his mother, Ellie (Jennifer Garner), and both are still mourning the loss of Adam’s scientist father, Louis (Mark Ruffalo).
When the two Adams meet, it doesn’t take long for the younger version’s mind to be blown. His frame of reference is the cinema, about the only way he can process this miraculous encounter.
Films like Back to the Future, Star Wars and The Terminator are all name-checked, while Marvel’s current penchant for the “multiverse” is also alluded to when younger Adam theorises that this is how his older self has arrived. “A multiverse? My god, we’ve watched too many movies,” quips Reynolds’ Adam.
These early scenes as the two Adams get acquainted are among the film’s high points. They don’t particularly like each other and get on each other’s nerves, creating an amusing love-hate dynamic. It brings to mind that old cliché of what you’d tell your younger self if you could – in this case, be nice to your mother, because she’s suffering too.