Film: Project Almanac (2014)

In which a bunch of young people build a time machine based on plans left behind by the lead's dead father after seeing the lead on a home movie of his ten-year-younger self's birthday.  The screenwriting debut of writers Jason Pagan and Andrew Deutschman as well as the feature debut of director Dean Israelite - the cousin of Jonathan Liebesman, he who directed Platinum Dunes' The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) - this sits alongside The Purge (2013) in the Non-Franchise Science Fiction section of Platinum Dunes' output.  A found-footage movie (which ends with the footage being found), it's USP is that the footage concerns its characters travelling through time and capturing on the camera both the time travelling and the effects the characters' actions have on the timeline (including a Back To The Future-esque fade-out variation of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect).  As the characters make mistakes and travel back again and again to fix things, it makes a verbal reference to Groundhog Day (1992) as well as Looper (2012) (marking a character in the past and witnessing its effects on them in the present) and - in what is perhaps the most flaccid "geeky" reference imaginable - Doctor Who.

As with slasher movies, its leads aren't people that we particularly care about, the blonde girl barely registers, the central lead Jonny Weston is clearly more than ten years older than his past self but Sam Lerner does seem a suitable, if not better, replacement for Shia LaBeouf if they ever consider bringing Sam Witwicky back to the Transformers movies.  This is more of a film where you don't character about the characters but you're more interested in what happens to them.  The plot fairly aimlessly wanders once they have figured out how the time travel works and use it to their own ends, such as winning the lottery (and using it to help the lead's mum), getting back at a high school bully and a teacher as well as - albeit with questionable ethics - getting the girl (cf. About Time, 2013).  The found-footage motif is really only justified by the time travel angle but as with Cloverfield (2007), the filming and editing techniques might be put to interesting use outside of the 'found-footage' genre.  Also, Imagine Dragons' Radioactive gets performed at a gig, the usage of which in any film might be enough to bump up a star rating.