Believing he has to show off another cool invention to get the scholarship, David begins hunting around in the attic and basement of his parents’ house for inspiration. David’s father, it turns out, was a scientist himself before his untimely death around David’s seventh birthday. Among his father’s old stuff, David finds the plans for something called Project Almanac – a top-secret time travel device his dad decided to hide before he met his maker. Directed by Dean Israelite, Project Almanac appears to use Josh Trank’s 2012 sleeper hit Chronicle as its template, from the high school teen antics to the use of found footage. This time, it’s David’s sister Chris who unaccountably films everything, including conversations occurring so far away that it’s difficult to figure out how she could be picking up what anybody’s saying. By now, the trappings of the found footage genre are as familiar as any in cinema, from the occasional excited questions like, “Are you seeing this?” or “Please tell me you got that” to the occasionally irksome glitch effects and date stamps. Project Almanac fails to find the same kind of interesting ideas Trank explored in Chronicle, where the camera whipped and whirled around on the telekinetic whim of its protagonists. Here, it feels like a contrivance rather than a core part of the narrative. “We only have enough power to go back three weeks into the past because… I’ll tell you later,” David blurts to one of his friends. You don’t necessarily expect Primer levels of scientific believability in a teen time travel movie, but unlike a classic film like Back To The Future, Project Almanac fails to sketch in the rules of its sci-fi plot in a way that at least feels believable in the moment. In Back To The Future, we understood within a scene or two that tinkering with history comes at a cost, and a single image – that of faces vanishing from an old photograph – is powerful enough to lay out the stakes without getting too bogged down in logical details. It’s only after a considerable amount of leaping back a few days into the past and pulling off a series of self-serving tricks and pranks – entering the lottery, getting even with bullies and the like – that Project Almanac begins to darken slightly, and this is after an over-long and largely extraneous sequence at a Lollapalooza music festival. Even here, when the ripple effect of time travel begins to tell on David, the plot never quite gets going; numerous questions are left either obscure or unanswered, which might point towards some last-minute retooling at the editing stage. On the positive side, Project Almanac’s quintet of plucky young actors have a real chemistry, and the film’s at its strongest when they’re just messing around with their temporal relocation device (the film’s term). Although by no means a failure, Project Almanac isn’t exactly a triumph in time travel movie terms, either. Project Almanac is out on now in UK cinemas. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.