WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Adam Project, now available on Netflix.
In Netflix’s The Adam Project, Ryan Reynolds’ Adam Reed is a time-jumping pilot who flew a ship from 2050 to 2022 to try to find his wife, Laura (Zoe Saldana), another time-jumper. However, his mission soon changed from bringing her back home to something that’d make fans of Avengers: Endgame’s Time Heist wonder about the repercussions of Adam and his younger self (Walker Scobell) breaking the rules of the time stream.
Rest assured, though, the rules are laid down to deal with any Butterfly Effect, and they’re less obscure than Endgame. With that in mind, let’s dissect how temporal movement worked in the movie and the deus ex machina that allowed tampering of history.
How Does Time Travel Work In The Adam Project?
In 2018, Adam’s dad, Louis (Mark Ruffalo), laid the foundation for time travel with a career in quantum physics. He engineered a particle accelerator (which he named The Adam Project) and an algorithm, stored on a hard drive at Sorian Industries, that could stabilize the worm holes from his theoretical work.
Louis died in 2020 after develop0ing the mathematical equation and accelerator. His business partner, Maya (Catherine Keener), then appropriated the work to build an evil empire. That empire used jets that could fly to various times, genetically matched to pilots like Adam and Laura, making her a wicked overlord in the decades that passed. This DNA-link allowed Young Adam to activate his older self’s jet when Big Adam was unable to.
As for time-travel monitoring, Laura logged many trips, including her coming to 2018 to investigate an authorized time jump. The rogue jumper was the older Evil Maya, who went back to before Louis’ death to tell her younger self how to form corporate and political alliances in order to take control of the temporal project when her friend eventually died. Unfortunately, Evil Maya blew up Laura’s jet in 2018 and thought she killed her, which only served to maroon Laura and push Big Adam to come find her.
What Is Fixed Time And How Does It Negate Paradoxes?
In many movies, it’d be considered a paradox when Big Adam met his younger self, which Laura deemed “parallel contact.” After all, if Big Adam worked with himself as a child, he should remember everything that happened next, as the kid would have all these memories while he grew up.
However, this is explained away early on when the Adams first encountered each other. Big Adam brushed off the concept of branched timelines or the multiverse, indicating everyone has only one point in time where they belong on a quantum level. This anchor point is called their Fixed Time — his is 2050, along with Laura and Evil Maya; Young Adam’s is 2022; while Louis’ is 2018.
If someone died in another time period, they’d shimmer away. But when a person got back to their Fixed Time, their memories would change, reconciling all the events of their trips to create a fuzzy new memory. Laura deemed this an “echo,” which is why she wanted the Adams to get to 2018 and erase Louis’ time-travel tech to prevent Evil Maya’s dystopian future in 2050 and return the Adams to their Fixed Times. Louis would more than likely be the only one knowing they all met for sure, while the Adams would have flashes of the journey. This is why, when the Adams completed the mission and healed 2050, Big Adam was still drawn to romance Laura.
To see how time-travel got remixed, check out The Adam Project, now streaming on Netflix.
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