The premise of the film (formerly and awkwardly known as Welcome to Yesterday) is fairly simple: Nerdy-but-attractive high school genius David Raskin (Jonny Reston) gets into his dream college and wants to make a last-ditch effort to win a scholarship by coming up with a brilliant science experiment. The discovery of a strange home video from David's seventh birthday leads him, his sister Christina (Virginia Gardner), and his friends Adam (Allen Evangelista) and Quinn (Sam Lerner) to find a time machine prototype left behind by David's father, a brilliant scientist who died a decade earlier. After some experimenting, they get the machine to work and go back in time to do various young-people things (win the lottery, go to Lollapalooza), but inadvertently and invariably, they cause a lot of bad, tragic stuff to happen along the way.

From a purely technical and aesthetic standpoint, the found-footage style does almost nothing for the movie, raising more questions than it intends to answer. Like others of its ilk, Project Almanac can't seem to make up its mind about committing to the found-footage approach or not (Where is the mood-setting music coming from? Why are there multiple POV shots? Why did Christina start obsessively filming way before her brother told her to start documenting everything?) And for those who watch the trailer, Project Almanac will be a sci-fi film with few surprises. The kids use their "temporal relocation device" for fairly innocuous, expected purposes: to win the validation or love of a super popular/hot classmate, to re-do a chemistry class, to punish a bully, to be seen as cool in the eyes of their high school.

But it's in this context—Project Almanac as an earnest, yet flawed depiction of teen wishes and fears—that the filmmaking approach takes on new significance. The genre dramatizes the identity formation that goes on during the digital technology-glutted adolescent years, which are filled with screens and captured images, whether from smartphones, cameras, vlogging, or pictures on social media. While earlier in the 20th century popular culture more frequently imagined the camera as a voyeuristic tool (see Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window), the reality of recording has been far more normalized today, even if it hasn't lost its insidious potential. For the most part, characters in films like Project Almanac act like themselves, unfazed by the camera ever-trained on them.

Others, such as The Dissolve's Scott Tobias, have also noted the distinctly modern appeal of found footage in lending a sense of verisimilitude. But it's a truthfulness that has particular resonance with the teenage experience. In Project Almanac, there isn't just the main, audience-POV camera. There are mirrors, Facebook photos, Instagram videos, many of which capture the teens doing things they don't remember because they happened in an alternate-time universe. The film's found footage approach emphasizes this weird alienation, not as deeply creepy in the way that horror films tend to, but as a fairly normal part of being a digitally connected teen. (To understand this sense of alienation, all you need to do is go to your earliest Facebook posts, or your MySpace, or your LiveJournal).