“You know, you’ve always said that you wished you’d met me earlier,” Ryan Reynolds says to Zoe Saldana in the first official trailer for Netflix’s The Adam Project. “Here I am.”
In the sci-fi/family drama flick, Reynolds is Adam Reed, a pilot from 2050 who accidentally ends up back in 2022 and meets the 12-year-old version of himself, played by newcomer Walker Scobell. Adam’s goal is to stop time travel from ever being invented, confronting the darkness in his past while saving the future. Along the way, there’s an emotional reunion between father and son(s), with Mark Ruffalo taking on the role of Adam’s father and the inventor of time travel.
The new trailer, released on Tuesday, is chock-full of Spielbergian nostalgia, which should come as no surprise considering that The Adam Project is directed by Shawn Levy. As the executive producer and director of several episodes of Stranger Things, Levy has developed a signature 1980s-inspired referential filmmaking style. The upcoming film is the second collaboration between Levy and Reynolds after last year’s video game comedy Free Guy.
As young Adam, Scobell is essentially a sandy-haired dead ringer for Elliott from E.T., with a Marty McFly-style puffer vest to boot. The trailer offers glimpses of action-packed set pieces, like a car vs. aircraft chase through a forest and a battle with armor-clad enemies using a weapon that bears more than a passing resemblance to a lightsaber. Shots of shadowy woods bathed in the blinding blue glow of a hovering spaceship pay obvious homage to sci-fi offerings of decades past.
With broad family appeal and a star-studded cast rounded out by Saldana, Jennifer Garner, and Catherine Keener, The Adam Project has the potential to be one of Netflix’s biggest movies of the year. The film premieres next week on March 11.
