the time travel movie doomsday theory
"the adam project" (2022), "time bandits" (1981), and a subsequent cultural paradox
Imagine a time travel movie made in the year 2050, where the characters travel back to 2022. What culture would that movie evoke? The answer is echoes of ideas already trodden from the 00s, the 90s, the 80s and before. This movie already exists, strangely, and it came out on Netflix this March.
Netflix’s The Adam Project (2022) directed by Shawn Levy, follows twelve-year old Adam, played by Walter Scobell, as he is whisked into the past when his older-self, played by Ryan Reynolds, of Free Guy (2022) and many other action comedies, flies in from the year 2050. The script, originally by T.S. Nowlin, of the Maze Runner film adaptations, but subsequently passed-around by a team of additional writers, is stuffed with snarky-but-charming Reynolds-ian humor. The visuals have the slick sheen of a big budget movie, with highly produced computer generated visuals. This ranges from futuristic space jets, to the sunlit woods surrounding Adam’s childhood home, which was staged in a Vancouver hockey arena. Cinematographer Tobias Schleisser also worked on movies like Battleship (2012), Beauty and the Beast (2017), and A Wrinkle in Time (2018), all of which are similarly steeped in shiny CG and dazzling, but artificial sunlight.
The Adam Project is not concerned with science or “the rules of time travel,” compared to other more self-serious time travel movies like Primer (2003) or Predestination (2014). The Adam Project shrugs off such conventions with allusions to other time travel properties. At one point, Old Adam describes 2050 as being like The Terminator (1984) “on a good day.” After a while, whenever a character mentions paradoxes or alternate timelines to Reynolds’s Old Adam he just gives a vacant, exasperated look. Scobell’s performance as young Reynolds is a calibrated impression of Reynolds’s charismatic public persona, but slightly disjointed from Reynolds’s gloomy, realistic performance as Old Adam.
The two Adams visit familiar beats of beloved science-fiction adventure movies. Armed with a flashlight, Young Adam wanders through a darkened forest like Elliot in E.T. (1982) Later, Old Adam fights with a staff Adam excitedly calls a “lightsaber,” despite Old Adam’s protests. During another sequence, Young Adam leaps onto a platform and proudly declares a “superhero landing,” a term popularized in Deadpool (2016), another Reynolds vehicle. Such allusions have inspired swaths of list-icles like Every Marvel Parallel in Netflix’s The Adam Project or The Adam Project: The Best References to Film and Popular Culture. These references define the personality, the perspective of the script, and make the movie feel like an ode to the films which have formed this moment of popular culture—on the surface, anyway.
Watching The Adam Project, I found myself doing some mental time travel and sat down with my own Young-Self. It reminded me about seeing another movie, Time Bandits, from 1981. When I first watched Time Bandits directed, produced and written by Terry Gilliam, I was probably only 11. My Dad wandered into my room, hijacked the old Mac computer which sat across from my bed, and insisted I would love it. This week, when I watched The Adam Project (2022) it was unprompted by anyone, apropos of nothing. Maybe it was the way The Adam Project centers the relationship between Adam and his Dad, or time travel movies in general, but I found myself reflecting on why my Dad wanted me to see Time Bandits in the first place.
Time Bandits follows Kevin, played by Craig Warnock, a young boy who takes refuge from his dull life in the thrilling history of Ancient Greece. One night, Kevin is whisked away from his bed by a band of five bumbling robbers with a stolen map leading the group through holes in time. Together, they visit multiple points through history and meet famous figures, like Napoleon, Robin Hood, and Agamemnon. The practical special effects and wide-angle camera lens create an illusory atmosphere. In one scene, Kevin’s bedroom wall slides back, revealing an impossibly long hallway down which the group is pursued by a floating head representing the Supreme Being.
Every visual is what a young boy could conjure up while laying in bed, the surrealist product of the moments between consciousness and dreams. Kevin’s cultural obsessions crash through his wardrobe into reality. Gilliam animates mundane structures with magical realism. Gilliam's childlike, imaginative vision is woven with wicked jokes. He co-wrote Time Bandits with Michael Palin, of Monty Python, the comedy group with whom Gilliam had previously directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).
Time Bandits is dripping in Monty Python, from the casting of John Cleese as Robin Hood and Palin as the impish Vincent, to the idiosyncratic animation and painted backdrops. The humor is slapstick and absurdist. When I was 11, I couldn’t help but laugh along and be swept away in Gilliam’s fantasy.
Both films serve as portraits of the cultural minds of pre-pubescent boys. Rather than simply retreat into time, the boys are transported into their internal lives. Kevin visits the figures obsessed over in boyhood: kings and heroes and tyrants, all characters with which a young boy of the 1970s would be familiar. Meanwhile, Adam speaks in and acts on the ideas of Spielberg, Marvel, Star Wars and so on.
Neither of these movies were made for my particular generation, so imagine I am an impartial observer of two generations of boys. I don’t think that Agamemnon is more exciting than Darth Vader, or feel that modern video games have less cultural merit than a 1957 Gold Picture Robin Hood comic book. I don’t think Adam is some figure doomed by the vacuous culture of the 80s-10s, while Kevin is a brilliant young boy with a fruitful imagination rooted in really important history. Everything little boys like is both cool and not cool at the same time, always has been. While these movies can be seen and enjoyed by any person, both of these time travel movies retread boy-coded media within a boy-coded piece of media.
What Time Bandits allows us to understand about The Adam Project, and about all sci-fi fantasy movies is that, like in time travel, the same beats, stories, and characters will be retread and revisited until the end of media, but references must be used for world-building, not set-dressing. In Time Bandits the references are integral to the plot, woven with ingenuity, dark humor and whimsy. In The Adam Project references sit on top of the script, as if they were placed there so that later, they could be easily plucked away, and reorganized in list-icle form. It’s smart for marketing purposes, but comes at a price. Why watch The Adam Project when we could watch the movies it is so enamored with, E.T., Deadpool, Avengers, or Star Wars? An ode can become a list-icle, if the script only references.
The threat that movies will continue to borrow more and more from other movies looms heavily across many genres of film which reboot and revive old IPs. In the case of time travel movies which predicate themselves on retreading old ideas, this is a structural problem that is becoming an inevitability. The solution requires more than references. Lest we reach a point where one movie is simply another movie: the pop cultural singularity.