https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsgKpmIZWr0



Paramount has finally released a second trailer for the upcoming Project Almanac. The found-footage movie was titled Welcome to Yesterday when its initial theatrical preview released online and early on the feature was known as simply Almanac, but now the film has a locked title and a final trailer… though it still looks like Chronicle, only with teens gaining human-made time-travel tech (instead of super-powers from a seemingly alien source).

Project Almanac‘s cast includes youngsters Johnny Weston (Chasing Mavericks), Sofia Black-D’Elia (Gossip Girl), Virginia Gardner (The Goldbergs), Katie Garfield (The Devil’s Hand), Sam Lerner (Suburgatory), Patrick Johnson (Necessary Roughness), and Allen Evangelista (The Secret Life of the American Teenager). All play high-schoolers who, one way or another, get caught in the tangled mess of time-travel that results when a group of friends discover that one of their dads built (and then hid) a machine for jumping back in time.


Chronicle unfolds as a coming of age parable that mades sense being told through the lens of found-footage. The same may hold true for Project Almanac, though the trailer doesn’t really hint at why this project needed to be found-footage (besides to cut costs). Most of the elements teased in the preview footage – like timeline disruptions wreaking havoc on the world or the teens abusing their time-traveling ability (to gain fortunes, take revenge, etc.) – also seem to have been recycled from previous films, and don’t feel all that fresh as presented here.

Project Almanac is the feature-length debut for not just director Dean Israelite, but also screenwriters Jason Pagan and Andrew Stark. All three have already managed to procure more work – Israelite is attached to direct the WarGames remake, while Pagan and Stark are writing Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension – so who knows, maybe Project Almanac will be a pleasant surprise that offers more than your average throw-away found-footage movie nowadays. Maybe.