The Adam Project, the latest collaboration between actor Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy, is an original film that succeeds where many franchise movies fail. The actor and director are clearly a winning partnership, as Levy has signed on to direct Deadpool 3 with Reynolds as star and producer. The pair last worked together on the 2021 action-comedy hit, Free Guy.
The new Netflix movie finds Ryan Reynolds’ time-traveling pilot Adam embarking on a vital mission that takes him from 2050 to 2018 via an encounter with his 12-year-old self (Walker Scobell) in the present day. It’s a surprisingly warm-hearted sci-fi movie that – in between the action set-pieces - reflects upon childhood, parenthood, and grief. Though it was stuck in developmental hell for a decade, the wait seems to have paid off.
The Adam Project has a similar snarky comic tone to the Deadpool movies, but there’s a lot more heart and much less self-indulgence. Instead, The Adam Project is less like Deadpool and more like Free Guy, an original property that is literate in both genre and the wider popular culture landscape. Despite not having a connection to an existing IP, The Adam Project is more successful at invoking the nostalgic spirit that so many franchise movies strive for. An awkward teenager with an absent father, discovering both futuristic technology and a mysterious figure in the woods outside his home, is pure Spielberg. Despite being set in 2022 and 2018, it's a more satisfying and celebratory '80s throwback than the recent spate of sequels and remakes of beloved movies.
These tonal callbacks to films such as E.T., Flight of the Navigator, and Back to the Future fit with the central themes. It's a movie in which Ryan Reynolds' character confronts his younger self and the regrets he’s harbored over how he treated his parents. For a film that’s so centered around family, it makes sense for The Adam Project to invoke those family-friendly sci-fi movies that filled the shelves of video rental stores in the 1980s and '90s. As with all the best family movies, the parents watching can enjoy the melancholic, nostalgic tone while their kids can enjoy the stunts and the jokes.
The Adam Project isn’t an exercise in empty nostalgia, however. Much like the early works of Spielberg, it’s a sci-fi movie about the loss of a father. The elder Adam is a reckless, damaged man who’s endured a tough life. He’s what his younger self will become if he can’t come to terms with his father’s death. The Adam Project's time travel plot allows both Adams to have their final reconciliation with their father Louis (Mark Ruffalo) and make things right with their mother Ellie (Jennifer Garner). The Adam Project is about saving the future, but it’s not about saving it from Louis’ villainous business partner; it’s about saving Adam from his own grief.
This familial dynamic is the film’s strongest element because as it’s not a 2020s sequel to an old movie, it hasn’t had to retroactively engineer a family for a much-loved character. This was the main issue for a film like Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which asks an audience to conjure up a whole Spengler family in a matter of minutes. Afterlife is a more interesting film when it becomes clear that it’s about the relationship between Ivan and Jason Reitman. With The Adam Project's original characters that don't belong to a legacy IP, the audience requires no prior knowledge and can quickly get on board with the story. As a result, the film is more entertaining, emotionally satisfying, and warmly nostalgic than many recent franchise sequels and remakes.