2015 in film: Blackhat and Project Almanac

Well, here we are, 2015. Now, for a review of some movies!

Blackhat
Overall.... a somewhat okay film. The plot was pretty well written as it ties to the state of cyber security and hackers causing potentially deadly chaos. The scenes of data flowing through computer chips was interesting, and it makes one think about how incredibly complex a computer system is. It's a miracle that just metal and electric pulses can make all this possible in this journal and all other things. The method of the hackers targeting a part of a system and working it to make it break catastrophically hit home with another real computer virus that is out there: stux.net. But that was the only part of the plot that I liked. I wasn't to impressed with the characters, or the ending. At the end, Chris Hemsworth's character just takes the money, doesn't go back to jail, kills the hacker(though the prick had it coming) and lives a new life on the run with his friends sister. Kinda extreme for a computer hacking genius to just kill a couple guys. Seems a little forced and out of character. Maybe this was written in to make the end more exciting. It could have ended differently, but then I'm not the writer. Over all I give it a score of 4/10, but you decide in the end if it's any good.

Project Almanac
Pretty good for another found-footage film. I liked the effects and some moment were pretty funny too. This is also an interesting play on older versions of time travel. It's like if you took Bill and Ted from Bill and Ted's Awesome Adventure(which makes an appearance in the movie), put them in this time, and gave them some actual brains, and the instructions on building a time machine. The film starts out with the typical things a guy would do if he had a time machine to improve the way of life for them, then it becomes something new. One thing I'd never seen before and I don't know if any other film or book has ever used this interesting phenomena: the paradox. The paradox means that you can't see yourself from another reality or timeline as it would cause both versions of yourself to instantly vanish from both of the worlds. Or it could end the entire universe as well. But that doesn't happen in the film. Then begins what always follows time travel, unforeseen consequences. And these events are much more complex in terms of the cause and effect that are indirectly caused by the characters. But some of them seem a little stretched to cause such problems. Toward the end Johnny Weston's character reached the conclusion that the only way to right everything is to make it so the time machine is never built, thus making the whole film never happen at all. But the end.... that leaves me with lots of questions! If the whole thing doesn't happen, wouldn't the camera used to film the events not exist either? And the ending also makes one wonder what will happen, leaving us to figure out what it could mean. Overall for great effects, great plot, and great characters, I give Project Almanac a 9.8/10. Point 2 points off for not respecting all the rules of time travel. In the end, my personal feelings of time travel were confirmed in this movie. "It's a good idea but the past isn't worth changing, and the future isn't worth knowing."

Well, that took a lot of writing to get done. We'll see what this year has in store for films.