“After accidentally crash-landing in 2022, time-travelling fighter pilot Adam Reed teams up with his 12-year-old self on a mission to save the future.” That’s the logline on Netflix’s The Adam Project, which doesn’t give you much until you find out that it’s from the same director-star team that made the enormously popular Free Guy: Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds. And now a whimsical, action-packed new trailer has appeared.
In The Adam Project, Adam in 2050 will have to get Adam in 2022 to help him repair that crash-landed ship — a key part of his crucial mission to save the future — an idea that’s met with some resistance at first. Of course, he knows best how to convince himself to do something he doesn’t want to do. “The humour that Adam uses in the movie echoes certain aspects of my own life, which is that it’s a defence mechanism,” Reynolds told Vanity Fair recently. “It’s a defence mechanism from allowing anything in and trying to deflect. And of course part of the journey that he’s on is to lower that shield.”
And just because Levy and Reynolds worked together on Free Guy doesn’t mean The Adam Project will be anything like that film. “This character is night-and-day different from the character Ryan played for me in our last movie,” Levy told the magazine. “[Free Guy’s] Blue Shirt Guy is a deeply innocent, naive boy in a man’s body. Whereas Adam Reed in The Adam Project is bruised by life and consequently deeply cynical.”
The Adam Project stars Reynolds as Adam and Walker Scobell as young Adam. The rest of the cast includes Mark Ruffalo as Adam’s father (a time-travel scientist who dies at some point prior to the events in 2022) and Jennifer Garner as Adam’s mother (yes, that is an official 13 Going on 30 reunion happening), plus a badass Zoe Saldaña and a not-appearing-in-this-trailer Catherine Keener.
The Adam Project hits Netflix on March 11.
Editor’s Note: Release dates within this article are based in the U.S., but will be updated with local Australian dates as soon as we know more.