According to director Shawn Levy and actor Ryan Reynolds, the rules of time travel will be addressed in The Adam Project, a new sci-fi adventure film coming to Netflix soon.
In an interview, Levy shared: “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.”
He added, “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.”
The Adam Project, according to Levy, was inspired by Reynolds’s time travel rules, which enabled them to weed out excessive violence from the movie in order to make it suitable for “all-audiences”. The rule stems from the number of “time soldiers” that Reynolds’ and co-star Zoe Saldana’s characters kill during the course of the film.
Levy states “And 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 Adam Project stars Ryan Reynolds as Adam Reed, Walker Scobell as Adam Reed when he was 12 years old, and Mark Ruffalo as Adam’s father, who died in a car accident. It is around the elder Adam, a time-traveling fighter pilot, who must team up with his younger self and his late father in order to preserve the future. The Adam Project is directed by Levy from a scenario written by Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett, and Mark Levin. In addition to Reynolds, Scobell, Ruffalo, and Garner, the picture also has Catherine Keener, Zoe Saldaa, and Alex Mallari Jr as supporting characters, among others.
Netflix’s The Adam Project is set to air on March 11th.
