
Netflix’s The Adam Project whizzes through its exposition to crack on with more action and jokes, so we take a step back to figure out how any of this worked.
Warning: spoilers for The Adam Project and its time travel adventure are in play. We’re going to talk about a lot of plot points here, and it’s all classified. So don’t be afraid to head out to a spoiler-free piece of coverage on CinemaBlend, should you want to remain fresh.
Oh boy. Where do I begin with this latest wrinkle in the timeline? You know how, through some sort of fun and games another version of me traveled a year in the future to talk about how Hot Tub Time Machine’s time travel works? Well, that version of me promised we were going to talk about Timecop next, and to be fair I can see why. There are events in Netflix’s The Adam Project that echo that very movie’s plot, and it could have made for some useful background.
However, with the recent release of Ryan Reynolds’ journey to the past on everyone’s minds, it only seemed right to shift gears for the moment. We’re all about timeliness here at CinemaBlend, and timelines can always shift in the name of excitement. Before we get started, here’s a quick word of wisdom from fellow time expert Christopher Lloyd; thanks to a very special PSA hyping the movie we’re about to discuss:
Without further delay, let’s fire up the Time Jet, crank up The Spencer Davis Group, and discuss from here to there in the then and now.
The Time Travel In The Adam Project
In the future, the world is pretty messed up, and under the control of one Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener). Desperately hoping to correct the timeline, Captain Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) makes an unauthorized trip into the past, but accidentally finds himself running into his younger self (Walker Scobell) in the process. Hilarity, and Star Wars style shenanigans, ensue.
Who’s Time Traveling
Our main time travelers are both versions of Adam Reed, with the older version of Maya Sorian chasing them down through the timeline. Though it’s later revealed that Adam’s wife and fellow time pilot Laura (Zoe Saldana) has also made her own jump into the past.
From When To When
The events of The Adam Project take place between 2018 and 2050, with Older Adam accidentally stopping in 2022 to pick up Younger Adam. This is also where he reunites with Laura, after previously thinking she had died in a trip to 2018.
The Purpose Of Their Trip
Thanks to Maya Sorian’s evil scheme to manipulate her past self into building a world ruling empire, the timeline has become corrupted. Piecing together this insidious conspiracy in 2050, Adam Reed needs to go back to 2018 to prevent his father, Louis (Mark Ruffalo) from accidentally inventing time travel.
How Time Travel Happens In The Adam Project
Prepare for one of the coolest time machines this side of Doc Brown’s DeLorean! Just when Ryan Reynolds had thought people would forget his time as an ace pilot in Green Lantern, he’s thrown into another hot shot’s cockpit in The Adam Project’s preferred method of temporal excursion: the Time Jet! Coded to the DNA of the pilot that is assigned to a specific jet, only that person (or any incarnation they meet on the timeline) can use it.
How this works is actually quite simple, and definitely in line with how Back to the Future’s time travel works. Since Time Jets fly through air and space with ease, you only need a space that has enough room to hold a localized wormhole that makes time travel possible. Time Jets generate these wormholes, through a cannon mounted on the underside of the craft, and all that’s required is the right amount of energy to produce the charge that opens these wormholes.
It’s all possible thanks to ISPCA, or the Infinitely Shifting Plasma Containing Algorithm. Designed by Louis Reed to stabilize the wormholes he and Maya were working with, the man himself describes it as “the mathematical equation to make time travel possible,” its existence holds the key to everything. Destroy that, you destroy time travel.
Unfortunately, this process can be a bit tricky, as The Adam Project shows us first hand. Captain Adam Reed meant to zap himself back to 2018, where the problems of his future all began; but he accidentally winds up in 2022. There’s a lot of “oopsie daisies” in this universe, and they all add up to Maya Sorian’s dastardly plot to control the world.
Can History Be Changed As A Result Of Time Travel In The Adam Project?
Thanks to Maya Sorian’s funding and Louis Reed’s work creating “utilitarian wormholes in space,” the experiment known as The Adam Project actually gave humanity the means to travel through time. Time travel can absolutely change history in this universe, and its mere existence is the catalyst for the chain of events that see the Adams facing off against Sorian.
In terms of how our time travelers exist in the universe of The Adam Project, it’s basically a case of one singular timeline that’s being rewritten in real time. Since Maya Sorian’s disruptions originate in 2018, the timeline that sees The Adams going on their adventure is already skewed. While Laura freaks out about “parallel contact” between the younger and older Adam Reed, it’s not a problem as things are already borked from four years prior to their meeting.
By time The Adam Project puts right what once went wrong, the singular timeline is corrected to its original state. It only took two major corrections, which unraveled the consequences of Sorian’s empire building enterprises.
Time Travel Exists. You Just Don’t Know About It Yet.
Who’s ready for our next lesson in time travel? This one comes courtesy of Prime Video’s The Tomorrow War, where we’ll see what happens when Chris Pratt and his fellow soldiers are drafted into a war that’s decades in the future. That’s your homework for next week, so make sure your Amazon Prime subscription is in order to be prepared.
Why Did Adam Travel Back in Time?
Hotshot pilot Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) is on a mission to locate and rescue his wife, Laura (Zoe Saldana). Against the rules laid out by his superiors headed up by Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener) in a dystopian 2050, he steals a jet and time-jumps back to 2018 to find out what happened to Laura but accidentally winds up in 2022 instead, where he meets his cute-but-mouthy 12-year-old self (played by Walker Scobell), whose tiny frame, asthma issues, and “punchable face” are a long way from the tall, handsome, and incredibly ripped version of Future Adam.
Realising he’s misjudged the time jump by four years, Adam has little patience for the tricky situation he’s now in, and the awful way Young Adam treats his mother Ellie (Jennifer Garner) after his father’s sudden death. In the future, Adam has shifted his anger and grief from his mother’s shoulders onto his dead dad’s legacy: it turns out daddy Louis (Mark Ruffalo) was the one who accidentally invented time travel in the first place, causing a chain reaction that led to a very bleak future for everyone, including Adam.
The Time Jet
Gritting his teeth and buckling down, Future Adam realizes he needs Young Adam to fix his damaged ship, as the time jet’s controls work by recognizing the user’s DNA. Because Adam is injured, the jet won’t let him fix the damage or fly it. However, Young Adam’s uninjured DNA will apparently work just fine in a pinch so that Adam can heal and hopefully take over control of the ship after repairs are complete. Unfortunately, Adam doesn’t heal before he jumps back to 2018, and so Young Adam has to stick around.
Meanwhile, the villainous Sorian and her clean up crew track the time jet back to the past, where Adam has temporarily escaped her clutches.
Time Travel Logic
Young Adam is excited to meet his buff older self, but is naturally very confused and inquisitive about how time travel works. He wants to know if Adam remembers everything that’s happening, since they’re the same person and all. Or maybe this is a multiverse situation where these events are kickstarting a completely different timeline now that Adam has interfered with the past?
Adam rebuffs as many questions from his younger self as possible and dismisses the notion of a multiverse, mocking him for watching too many movies (the MCU is shaking), telling him that when he goes back to the future his memories of these events will be restored so that he knows what happened, but right now he doesn’t know how all this is going to end or how much of a mess he’s made of the timeline, which is fixed on “a quantum level.”
Yes, unlike those pesky Avengers: Endgame time travel rules, Adam can absolutely change the future here by traveling back to the past, and his quest to find out what exactly happened to his wife Laura may do just that.
Adam’s Wife Laura
Adam tells Young Adam how he met his wife, Laura, when he was still at the academy. She had arrived late to a lecture and was in the wrong building. He’d offered to walk her to where she needed to be and he fell head over heels in love with her.
In the future, Laura hadn’t come back from a time jump, and Adam was informed that her jet broke up on re-entry. He refused to believe this because Laura was the best pilot in their program. He discovered her flight logs were altered by someone keen to hide the truth, and that’s why he first decided to hop back to 2018 and investigate her fateful mission.
Adam suspects that Future Sorian was involved in Laura’s disappearance, and Young Adam is perplexed. To him, Young Sorian is simply his dead dad’s lovely business partner.
Laura eventually shows up to fight with Adam in 2022 while his younger self tags along. She has been in hiding for the last four years waiting for Adam to come and find her. Laura tells him that her mission to 2018 went awry after she began investigating jump logs that indicated someone had been visiting that point in history and was wiping the data.
Laura explains that it was Future Sorian, who has been tinkering with the early months of time travel development in order to engineer a glorious future by giving her younger self tips on how to get the job done. Sorian has already changed the future using her tech knowledge and past working relationship with Adam’s father, and this future is now the only one Adam knows. It’s…not good.
It’s clear that Adam has to go back to 2018 – for real this time – and stop time travel from ever being invented, even if it means losing Laura forever. Laura then dies keeping Future Sorian busy so that Adam and Young Adam can escape to 2018.
Sorian’s Deal
Adam is pursued into the past by Future Sorian, who is dead set on eliminating Adam to make sure he doesn’t meddle with her illustrious future as the Queen of Pretty Much Everything.
Thanks to her nefarious time jumps, Sorian has gotten rich off Adam’s dad’s time travel tech, and become incredibly powerful. In the future she has control over the most valuable resource on Earth: time travel. Why did she do all this? Because in the past that she has now changed, the government originally took the time travel tech and research away from her in the wake of Louis’ death, and she was left feeling like all the money and huge life sacrifices she made for the company were pointless.
Once again traveling back to 2018, Future Sorian tells Young Sorian that they need to clean up the Adam problem before its too late.
The MacGuffin
Adam’s dad Louis invents the magnetic particle accelerator circa 2018 while working with Sorian. He dubs his research “The Adam Project” (hey, that’s the name of the film!) and Future Adam has to convince him to destroy everything he’s worked for to prevent time travel technology from evolving.
It’s not an easy task. Louis and Adam had a difficult relationship when he was a child because Louis spent a lot of time at work, and Adam felt neglected. The two come to blows when they meet, but Louis eventually understands that the only way to save humanity from Sorian’s terrible future is to destroy The Adam Project.
Adam, Young Adam and Louis infiltrate the Sorian Technology facility in order to shut down The Adam Project for good. All they need to do is to remove and kill the crystal hard drive at the heart of the magnetic particle accelerator, because apart from this single piece of physical tech Louis never shared the algorithm that makes it all work with anyone else.
The Ending Explained
As Louis and Adam set out to complete their mission, the Sorians intervene to stop them changing their future, and Future Sorian threatens to kill Young Adam. Louis tries to reason with her to no avail, and Sorian accidentally ruptures the electromagnetic seal containing the MPA. Magnetic items are drawn towards the MPA, and the reactor begins to fall apart.
Future Sorian then tries to kill Louis and take the hard drive, but the armor-piercing bullet deflects towards the MPA and kills her younger self instead, eliminating Future Sorian from the timeline. Louis is confused because the two versions of his son are still lingering in the past when they should have also disappeared, but the pair assure him that it is happening, albeit more slowly than with Sorian.
Louis comes to understand that he will soon die, leaving Adam alone with his mother. He refuses to hear critical information that will save his life, as he already feels conflicted about changing the future of time travel itself, let alone his own future path, but he takes the little time they all have left to reconcile with his sons, and the trio play one last game of catch before the Adams vanish.
Future Adam tells Young Adam that he should take the time to appreciate his mom, and realizes that his own efforts to escape the memories of his youth were futile and damaging. Meanwhile, Louis is left with the understanding that he should spend more time with his family before he dies.
Back in 2022, Young Adam begins forging a more loving relationship with Ellie. In a flash-forward to the future, we discover than Laura was right to hope that she and Adam would still meet and fall in love in the future, and we see their encounter at the academy play out under the same circumstances described by Adam earlier in the film.
What Are The Consequences Of Time Travel In The Adam Project?
Despite the agreement between Louis Reed and Maya Sorian that The Adam Project would have an oversight committee to ensure ethical usage of time travel, that never happens. After Louis’ untimely death, Maya takes over the project, and uses it to install herself as a ruthless tyrant. If it wasn’t for Louis’ well-intentioned work, none of this would have ever happened.
How Time Travel Impacted The Life Of Maya Sorian
Through Maya’s altered timeline, she’s practically unstoppable. Rich beyond her wildest dreams, and ethically corrupt as a result, she has legions of troops and henchmen helping her rule with an iron fist. Unfortunately for her, that hubris leads to her trying to kill Young Adam in 2018, which through a series of scientific flukes and bad luck leads to her accidentally erasing herself from the timeline by killing Young Maya.
How Time Travel Impacted The Life Of Adam Reed
Sadly, Adam Reed cannot save his dad, as those events are not connected to The Adam Project’s ultimate mission. However, through his journey with his younger self and his late father, Adam learns to process his grief better throughout life. Repairing his relationship with his dear mother Ellie (Jennifer Garner), Adam becomes a better person, and a good son. Thankfully, it all leads up to Adam and Laura still meeting in the future, without a time pilot program to take them apart.

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