For what it is it's fine. It's nothing groundbreaking as it goes through its consequences fairly quickly. However, the cast has fun with it, it's entertaining, and it does have some interesting yet light takes on the "butterfly effect".

They are both definitely bangable and while I usually go for a darker hair chick, Virginia Gardener I would bang more.

This movie was really good. B+

I'm a sucker for this kind of movies.

C

Doesn't go anywhere new with the formula and it wastes its cast's chemistry with the focus on the second half becoming only the protagonist's inert relationship with his father. We feel no empathy for the main character as we should have felt to have any investment when it all starts to fall apart from his own doing. The "found footage" technique worked and didn't; all in all this cinematography/direction/storytelling fad should die and never return.

Honestly this was a pleasant surprise. I thought it was really well-done with likable characters. Highly entertaining and pretty much on-par with Chronicle. After Kelly & Cal I was already a fan of Jonny Weston and he again proves to be a very charismatic young actor here. He's definitely going places.

8/10 (B+)

SPOILERS

It's a damn entertaining movie for the first 90 minutes, if you can get by the major plothole that the camera is able to record EVERYTHING. How would the camera be able to record multiple timelines? Fuck it, just go with it. The lead goes back in time, says hi to dad (and surprisingly lets him die), and destroys the time machine. He disappears and the camera is just left on for the battery to drain. That should've been the end of the movie. It still wouldn't have made any sense, but it wouldn't have been as bad as what happened when they try to go for a happy ending.

We double back to the beginning of the film when the brother and sister find the original camera, but now they've found two, with all the events of the film being on the second camera. They look at one another, then we cut to the brother walking up to his crush in the cafeteria, and after he blows her mind with "telepathy", he says to her, "We're going to change the world.".

WHAT? First of all, as I already mentioned, none of the events that previously happened would actually be on the camera. Fine, we get movie, you're now dumb. But, second, how are they going to change the world? We assume he means time traveling again. But that begs two questions. It's heavily implied he watched the video. How else would the telepathy gag work? So if that's the case, did he watch it up until the beginning when everything was fine and they didn't fuck everything up? Or did he watch the whole thing and still decided to go through with the time travel? Great decision making. Just be happy you can trick the hottie into fucking you. Or maybe don't change anything after you win $1.8 million.

Question number two: HOW ARE THEY GOING TO GO BACK IN TIME IF HE DESTROYED THE PARTS THAT ALLOWS THEM TO BUILD THE TIME MACHINE IN THE FIRST PLACE? In the original timeline, they only build onto his father's original invention. How are they going to recreate what his father built on his own?

Mid-review reading point

Apparently there is a blink and you'll miss it shot of David holding a piece of paper from 2025 before he burns the blueprints/parts. This has cause some people to say that maybe at MIT he figured out his dad's side of the project, went back to 2014 and left it for younger David to find and that's how he'd able to change the world? It would've been fantastic if the film decided to show any of this. The ending would've made at least a little bit of sense (despite the problem of the magical camera recording all timelines). Instead, my basic problem with the ending remains pretty much intact: it's just too fucking sloppy and ruins what was (for the most part) a pretty fun film.

And why doesn't he save his dad again?

** (C)

Watched it a while ago, before I saw Chronicle, and this actually made me party want to watch that too. It's also shot found footage camera style, and also done well. The actors are well cast, nothing like annoying, and it's a nice teenager's adventure in time travel. There isn't anything overly great or bad about it, it's just an entertaining watch. The film's events are realistic enough as far as time travel's concerned to not have you eye-rolling over this.
The film has a good pace, although it ends a bit hopscotchy connecting some dots together.

B

I have this at home from Netflix.

Oh, God, this is a serious worst-of-the-year candidate. A truly punishing sit. Everything is wrong with it. It is an hour-and-40-minute answer to the question: what would the world's horniest, loudest, most clichéd, most navel-gazing teenagers do if they could travel through time? It has the attention span of a gnat shot through with cocaine and jet fuel, abandoning ideas and subplots right and left. (The first 20 or so minutes, for instance, are devoted to protagonist David's deep desire to study at MIT. Does he go there in the end? Who knows? Who gives a shit?) And it has to represent a new low for the found-footage format, at least among mainstream examples. Yes, the post-production crew edits in "glitches," and the characters reference the (ludicrous) omnipresence of the camera now and then, but the film otherwise resembles any Michael Bay-produced project: heavy-handed color grading, blaring non-diegetic pop music, slow motion, etc. The feigning of a documentary aesthetic is so arbitrary, halfhearted, and idiotic. It only adds an extra layer of annoyance and obfuscation to what is already a poorly acted, insipidly conceived, and often truly vile experience.

And it is not even worth contemplating the film's "science" and its eleventh-hour attempt to build suspense via Bradbury-style time-travel-has-unintended-consequences melodrama. It is clear the film is entirely disinterested in these elements. Its heart lies instead in the interminable second-act Lollapalooza interlude, with its on-brand MTV montages of tight-bodied youths gyrating and product-placement ode to Imagine Dragons.

F

Awesome.

Greatly written review, enjoyed reading it so much. But totally disagree with it too, as I wrote before. For me there's no distinction between this and Chronicle, I liked the one, and the other is just as good for me. But I guess there's stuff under the surface to how scenes are written and shot that I don't latch onto.

I definitely look forward to this director's Power Rangers, no way it could fail like Fantastic Four. Right?

I am not the most ardent Chronicle fan, but I enjoyed it much, much more than this. It has actual thematic through-lines and a fantastic performance by Dane DeHaan. It has...the feel of an actual movie made by flesh-and-blood people at least remotely interested in human beings and also at least a bit fond of film as an art form.

I guess I felt related to this, and that's what probably drew me into it.