The following contains major spoilers for The Adam Project, streaming now on Netflix.
During the opening of The Adam Project, the titular character is shot in the abdomen before inputing the necessary sequences to time jump into the past from the year 2050. Bleeding from his gut, he manages to onboard a jamming signal in the hopes he won’t be tracked through the time stream and initiates the wormhole that will transport him to his destination. He fumbles the landing, arriving four years off target and crashes his jet into a canopy of trees. He realizes his mistake after running into his younger self who is the wrong age for the time period he targeted. Older Adam tries to stabilize his wound and then recruits the Adam of 2022 to help him with his ship as the two verbally spar and come to terms with the reality of their situation.
Due to his injuries the ship will not reveal itself from its cloak or initiate self repair routines in an effort to prevent the pilot from flying unsafely and since the vessel is also tied to a specific individual’s DNA signature the only way to get the ship operational is for Younger Adam to initiate the commands. This winds up working and the two team up to save the day, but this doesn’t take into account a host of reasons why activating the ship underneath these conditions is so much worse, or why not activating essentially dooms the injured pilot in most situations.
Studies have shown that 12 year olds lack psychosocial maturity, meaning that though they may have developed some cognitive functions in line with adults they are prone to impulsive reactions to stressors. Volatile situations, peer pressure and performance anxieties can all lead human beings during this stage of development to behave in ways that are self detrimental. Neurochemically speaking there are also a series of processes one’s body is undertaking during this time. One of them is called pruning, which involves a surplus of grey matter that was produced during early childhood but has remained dormant for whatver reason is eliminated from the frontal lobe. Another is myelination, wherein white matter fortifies and stabilizes the networks that are being used regularly to help regulate behavior.
If the DNA sequencer on Adam’s time jet is calibrated with enough granular detail to detect the discreet portions of DNA that separate one person from another instantaneously, in addition to gross metrics like blood pressure and heart rate, then it stands to reason that neurochemical composition might also be included. In the same way that intoxicants in one’s blood stream would prohibit them from piloting a vessel armed with machine guns that can tear spheres into the fabric of space-time, someone with the combustible biochemical admixture of adolescence should be similarly restricted. There is a good case to be made that a shot and bleeding adult is still a much better pilot of a well armed time machine than a completely healthy preteen.
It would also stand to reason that simply because it is a vehicle that traverses the past, present and future that safeguards would be in place preventing individual’s beyond their own fixed time being capable of enabling any such activations so as to prevent one version of one’s self from inappropriately interacting with the timeline. If Adam is to be believed about the state of the world in 2050 being worse than the apocalyptic vision of James Cameron’s Terminator, then even if time travel isn’t involved it would seem like an extremely hostile environment to find oneself wounded. This leads to another failsafe tied to the DNA sequencer in severe need of a redesign.
Not being able to have the ship repair itself while its human pilot is also in the process of healing seems like an unmitigated disaster. If a pilot has been wounded and needs serious medical attention, having access to a vehicle capable of transporting them somewhere to get that assistance would seem to be a crucial factor in enhancing the odds of their survival. The more significant the injury, the more urgency should be placed on getting the pilot care. Since the sequencer essentially prevents theft by anyone other than the tethered user and the ship has its own personal cloaking system, it would seem this redundancy exists to protect the pilot from themselves or to prevent them from causing damage to others in the attempt to fulfill a mission or get aid.
This seems overly cautious when weighed against the health of the human pilot, who at this point has already been entrusted with the integrity of the timeline, so it seems a tad incoherent to then question their judgment when it comes to endangering themselves or others. Given the theoretical catastrophes that can take place with someone dying outside of their fixed time, that largely go unanswered in the film, it seems as if it would be prudent for the ship to offer shelter and transit at a time when it is needed most. The most egregious oversight though is the fact the ship can’t even use the time available to repair itself while the pilot is on the mend. This sets up a set of scenarios where the ship’s protocols are almost designed to trap someone wherever they might be in the branches of time and space.
In the event that Adam, in this instance, was in trouble and had no access to someone with identical DNA, he would have had to use the time available to first get treatment, then meet a health threshold necessary for the ship to accept any of his requests and then he would have to wait for the ship to do the same for itself. If he were in a desert, stranded at sea or in a remote mountainous region he would have had to make the choice of staying inside the ship and hoping for the best or leaving with the understanding that there may be no way for him to return to the jet. In a dire circumstance, none of those options seem designed with the pilot in mind. In an attempt to provide Young Adam with more purpose in the story it undermined its own value as a narrative engine to navigate the complexities of time travel in the guise of pilot safety.
To see the Adams take advantage of a plot hole MacGuffin, The Adam Project is streaming now on Netflix.
