Watch | Shawn Levy on ‘The Adam Project’

The director, whose projects include Oscar-nominated film ‘Arrival’ and Netflix series ‘Stranger Things’, on the perils of absolute power and the long shadow of childhood in his latest sci-fi film

The Adam Project “is a family drama,” says director Shawn Levy. “And the film uses spectacle and the sci-fi genre as a vehicle for emotional storytelling.”

Also starring Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Garner and Zoe Saldaña, it has the character of Adam Reed, played by Ryan Reynolds, racing against time to fix things in the past. There are some moving realisations, when he meets his younger self using time travel, about mothers who sacrifice to no end, the nature of grief, and the things we do for love. And going by the limited reactions to the film so far, Levy says that it’s now clearer to him that it’s the “emotionality that has stuck” the most.

Incidentally, Levy, 53, was one of the co-producers on Denis Villeneuve’s (2016). Apart from being the story of a linguist trying to figure out the language of mysterious aliens, it was ultimately about a single mother making sense of a fragmented past involving her daughter. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for the Best Picture that year Arrival

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