The Adam Project director/producer Shawn Levy explains the rules of the time travel featured in his and Ryan Reynolds' new Netflix movie. Long before the Free Guy creative duo came aboard the sci-fi adventure, T.S. Nowlin's spec script had been acquired by Tom Cruise with the intention to star with Paramount Pictures eyeing an acquisition under its previous title Our Name is Adam. After nearly a decade of lingering in development hell, Netflix would later pick up the rights to the project with Levy attached to direct and produce and Reynolds attached to star and produce in mid-2020.
Reynolds stars in The Adam Project as Adam Reed, a time-traveling test pilot who ventures back to meet his younger self and his late father in an effort to come to terms with his past while also fighting to save the future from an unknown threat. Walker Scobell stars with Reynolds as the younger Adam alongside Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo as Adam's parents, Catherine Keener, Zoe Saldaña and Alex Mallari Jr. The Adam Project is gearing up to premiere on Netflix in March and those behind the sci-fi adventure are offering some insight to the film.
As part of the outlet's virtual Fan Fest, Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy caught up with IGN to discuss their new movie The Adam Project. When asked about the film's time travel rules, the director/producer kept appropriately vague to avoid spoiling the story though explained that they took a generally different approach than other time travel movies. See what Levy explained below:
"I'll start by saying that Ryan and I are not time travel genre wonks, so the goal was to make a time travel movie that felt really grounded and foregrounded character and fun and adventure and heart and didn't get too mired in the rules. To the extent that there are rules that I couldn't eliminate, basically, a person doesn't have their memories reconciled, ie. they don't remember something that has happened to them until they get back to what we, in this movie, call their fixed time.
Grown-up Ryan doesn't remember having gone back until and if and unless he's able to get back to his fixed time, which is the time period that he belongs in. We try to get the rules out of the way so that people can just enjoy the ride and have a visceral experience rather than a cerebral experience. our rule is that if you die out of your fixed time, you just have this molecular smear, what Ryan called 'digital skittles.' So, suddenly, making up a time travel rule, which we're allowed to do, freed us up to do all kinds of action that probably would have been too gory if we were actually doing literal death. So, just the freedom of writing the rules was very, very fun."
The time travel genre has delivered plenty of enjoyable efforts throughout the years, namely that of the Back to the Future franchise and Dennis Quaid-starring Frequency from which Levy has previously said The Adam Project draws inspiration from. However, even the most beloved of films in the genre have frequently been called into question for their time travel rules and either the convoluted nature of their mechanics or the lack of any real structure that causes the story to largely fall apart. Some of the most notable examples of the genre that saw their filmmakers truly take their rules into account are that of Primer, Rian Johnson's Looper and Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.
Levy and Reynolds' decision to make their own rules for The Adam Project not only allowed them a better sense of creative freedom in their tone and storytelling, but also sounds a way to bridge the more complicated rules of quantum mechanics with the simpler rules of audience-friendly genre fare. Levy's explanation also appears to hint at a more linear structure to how the time travel in the past affects the future, seemingly reminiscent of the Time Heist rules for the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Avengers: Endgame. Only time will tell how the time travel rules play out when The Adam Project premieres on Netflix on March 11.
Source: IGN
