Por: Juan Pablo Martínez Zúñiga
“EL PROYECTO ADAM” (“THE ADAM PROJECT”) – NETFLIX
The film opens with Ryan Reynolds piloting a futuristic aircraft while The Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’” plays in the background and we already know that the remaining 106 minutes will be an attempt by the comic actor to entertain us through a purely escapist exercise, something that worked wonderfully with the very efficient “Free Guy: Taking Control”, repeating even a partnership with director Shawn Levy for this Netflix project, nothing more than in “The Adam Project” they go too far the safe and all jocular and playful factor rests on the strengthened shoulders of Reynolds, who is already very comfortable in his charismatic gringo act with a white smile but with a sly sense of humor who always has a sharp response to everything and that already tires more what fun On this occasion Reynolds gives us Captain Adam, a pilot from the future (the year 2050 to be precise) who has the technology to travel through time, so he steals the aforementioned aircraft and returns to the year 2022 by mistake, well his intention is to return to 2018 for reasons that will be revealed later. Meanwhile, he decides to contact his past self, played with a lot of grimness by Walker Scobell, who must try very hard to be a child version of Reynolds with unnatural results. The relationship between the two is intended to be the heart of the film, as Young Adam (Scobell) is a young man constantly brutalized by school bullies, leading him in turn to be a complete jerk with his mother (Jennifer Garner), which antagonizes the perspective of the Adult Adam (Reynolds) but at the same time we understand that said reconnection will give each other the key points on an emotional and existential level that they require to be happy, since Young Adam misses his father (Mark Ruffalo) who died just the previous year , while Adult Adam misses his wife (Zoe Saldaña). The nodal point will be that both must travel even further into the past to locate their father who is still alive, since it is he who develops via serendipity (that is, by accident) the technology to produce time travel before the patron saint of Adam in the future, a woman who collaborates with his father in the past called Sorian (Catherine Keener), destroys him for personal interests.
It sounds like a jumble, but everything is quite unidirectional to the point that the many dramatic touches that are intended to be moving are cheesy and predictable while the jokes and jokes that also swarm on the tape are not very funny, especially since they already look too much like the characteristic repertoire of Reynolds in earlier films. Garner and Ruffalo are the most apt while the script employs the tickle technique to elicit laughter through obligatory verbal and assumable references to pop culture, including “Back to the Future” and other travel-related movies. time or “Star Wars”. Tears and forced laughter do not make a good movie, Yoda would say, and “The Adam Project” even with its good intentions and its story about second chances and fractured family relationships is no exception.
“PARALLEL MOTHERS” – NETFLIX
After addressing, dissecting and sublimating the mother figure in several of his most finished, intelligent and dramatic films (“Todo Sobre mi Madre”, “Volver”, “La Piel Que Habito”, et al.), the filmmaker from La Mancha Pedro Almodóvar embroiders with a subtle narrative thread the genesis and consequence of motherhood with this excellent drama embedded with finesse in the structure of the classic thriller where Penélope Cruz takes the post as the greatest Almodovarian muse after the deep traces left by the unforgettable Cecilia Roth, Carmen Maura and Victoria Abril playing Janis, a high-class photographer who works for the magazine Woman Now directed by her friend Elena (the also indispensable Rossy de Palma) and who asks a forensic anthropologist, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), to process before a private foundation in Navarra the exhumation of a mass grave with ten bodies of republicans killed by the fascists during the conflagration, among whom is Janis’s great-grandfather, The relationship goes from professional to passionate and Janis becomes pregnant. During maternity, she is fortuitously linked to another woman who will give birth, a teenager named Ana (a sensible and applied Milena Smit) who was raped by a group of young people and extorted for a sexual video on the go. On the day of delivery both give birth and their lives continue, until Janis realizes through a DNA test that her baby is not hers, to later find out that it is Ana’s daughter once the newborns were changed. at the hospital.
A premise like this runs the risk of collapsing in the telenovela snafu, but Almodóvar takes advantage of it to include some deep reflections on the maternal condition, the sociocultural role of women in a context of modernity and a glimpse of the past that delves into the dark facets that Spain went through during its Civil War by locating and exhuming the corpses that were part of the Republican versus Falangist movement almost a hundred years ago and that means a point of reunion with herself for Janis because they are her ancestors. “Parallel Mothers” is the confirmation that at this point Almodóvar no longer owes an explanation to anyone and that he has overcome the shadow of the filmmakers whom from the beginning he tried to emulate such as Douglas Sirk or Billy Wilder to now be the spokesman for a purely authorial and very honest look.
