So in the end, Ruffalo still dies and Adam’s memory is washed away. So the Ryan Reynolds pilot character is essentially dead, as is that whole timeline since we see him in college and he has no memory of the events of the movie. So really, it’s pretty sad that they got to play catch with their Dad and they effectively die at that point. Then a year and a half later, Ruffalo dies. Pretty morbid ending if you think about it.
shareSo? Where is it written that movies need a happy ending?
shareThe point is that everything that none of the characters or what they did actually happened. It becomes a bit of a so what. And even then the movie didn't make sense. Remember how quickly the woman vanished when her earlier self was taken out? Well why did it take so long for Adam's character and everything else to get reset? Frankly as soon as the woman was removed everything should have been reset because she was the center of all the bad things.
shareThat's not how time in "The Adam Project" works. Have you even seen the movie?
shareI did watch it. When old Mya shoots at Adam and the bullet is pulled into young Mya and kills her then old Mya instantly disintegrates. If the time reset itself that fast then it would have reset itself just as quickly with the Adams.
shareErgo: That's not how time in "The Adam Project" works!
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I like to think it follows "Back to the Future" logic, where change takes a while to propagate up the time line based on probability.
Adams of 2022 and 2050 stuck around because the likelihood that those versions of them were still possible, at least until the time stream finished self-correcting. Marty only started to vanish after his other siblings did in the photo, and then only when it became nearly certain George wouldn't wind up with Lorraine.
And like "Back to the Future," the time traveling Adams carry some memory of the other timeline.
Meanwhile, Maya Sorian of 2050 vanished instantly because the death of her younger 2018 self meant there was zero probability she'd exist in the future.
The same thing might happen in "Back to the Future" if Marty somehow killed Seamus McFly in 1885.
It's more likely that they just followed the script.
sharewow, way to kill the imagination of the thread. "derp they just followed the script". that's it..we're no longer friends commander. (yes i know where that name is from, but we're still no longer friends. you blew it pal...i mean ex pal.)
shareMaybe the magnitude of the change dictates how fast it takes for it to effect their future selves. Obviously, Mya accidently offing herself would be pretty impactful.
shareMya was also the force behind using the time machine for nefarious reasons in the first place so if killing young Mya instantly eliminated old Mya it should have also instantly eliminated everything Mya had done like killing Adam's girl which would have then eliminated Adam from going back in time. Everything should have been undone just as quickly as Mya turning to pixels.
shareI actually thought the ending was beautiful. They couldn't stop the dad's death because they had to let nature take its course. I know the boy and Ronalds don't remember what happens later on, but at least the dad did and he probably spent more time with his son and wife because of what happened. Thought it was a great and emotional moment for them when they were all playing catch for the last time. It kind of made me like the film more. This reminded me of the movie 'About Time'.
shareI'm with you. The ending was bittersweet, but powerful. Adam still meets Laura, so his life progressed as it had before, at least to that point. Maybe this time he'll get a happy ending, as there is no time travel to ruin things.
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I was especially impressed with Ruffalo's character for making the decision so consciously.
As he said, he realized when he saw both future Adams that he, himself, must have died somehow. And he was fine with it, much more than Doc Brown with his torn-up and tape-together warning letter.
Honestly, I thought it would turn out that Maya Sorian had somehow engineered the accident, but this version was braver and, in my opinion, more satisfying. If you want to end time travel, you have to accept ALL the consquences.
If you complain about something you should complain about the paradox (that's present in a LOT of movies):
you go back in time to alter the timeline and your actions in the present do alter the timeline but that timeline would not lead to you going back to the past to alter the timeline. And if you don't go to the past to alter the timeline then you don't alter the timeline and you get to you having to go to the past to alter the timeline ...
^^^
THIS
I enjoyed this for the dumb popcorn flick it was (I mean, seriously, Zoe Saldana's acting could make a soap opera watchable), but this is a very common problem with time travel movies. They did at least throw in a line or two to handwave this problem off with a half-assed explanation, but it would require external theorizing and creative thinking to complete the thought (something mumbo jumbo about quantum effects, conjoined with not being at your "fixed point" in the timeline, somehow allowing an "out of time" person to avoid the paradox and altered memories until returning to their "fixed point", or some such pseudo-sci-fi-magic, although unfortunately they did contradict this in-universe rule with how they handled the baseball toss scene at the end, so there's that). Few movies get this right, in large part because it's more difficult to plot out. A few that do (by avoiding a paradox): Twelve Monkeys, Predestination, Primer, Time Lapse, Timecrimes. There may be a couple more I'm not thinking of, but it's pretty rare that this gets handled correctly.
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Never believe. Always question. Rebuke belief, a.k.a. bias, a.k.a. groupthink, a.k.a. ideology, the bane of skeptical, logical reason.
Correct, but those movies are using a different approach:
They go back in time to stop the event and they end up generating the event or witnessing the event without changing it so there is no change in the timeline. Which makes sense and there's no paradox.
At least Marvel tried to fix that with the stones in Endgame when they stated that the stones MUST be reverted at the same moment and that they should NOT alter the past in any way (well, Cap did it ... or did he??)