The US military finds a crashed UFO in the desert, but President Eisenhower orders it to be destroyed. 30 years later, teenager Michael has to hand over a science project to his teacher, Mr. Roberts, but has no clue what to do. He takes his date, geek girl Ellie, to an unwilling ex-military base and finds a strange device with a gloving globe there. Back in school, Michael and his friend Vince introduce the device to Mr. Roberts, who gets sent back in time and vanishes. The device causes power outage, so Michael, Ellie and Vince blow up a power line to stop it draining even more energy. It also causes several time pockets in school, involving a Tyrannosaurus rex, Gladiators, Cave men and mutants from the future. They manage to unplug the device and stop the time portals, while Mr. Roberts returns back to the present from the 60s.
Overshadowed by the similar "Back to the Future" released that same year, independently produced cult film, "My Science Project" is a rather amusing little science-fiction teen adventure, though it did not exploit its time travel potentials to the fullest. The most was achieved from small character interactions which manage to give the story some charm and spark: in one very sweet moment, the geeky girl Ellie tries to bashfully make contact with Michael ("It's confession time... I need you to save me from being voted senior class spinster." - "What?" - "Be a boy scout and give me date.") which immediately lifts the level of the movie and gives these characters sympathy. Even more absurdly, Michael's idea of going on a date with Ellie is to break into the forbidden ex-military base. In another humorous moment, Ellie asks the teacher, Mr. Roberts, why he is fascinated by experiencing the alien device as some sort of a 'trip': "Wait a second Bob... Is this like when you told us we can smoke banana peels?" More of such inspired bits would have been welcome, since Ellie largely vanishes in the last act of the film, as well as the personalities of the other three characters. The story seems to be itself unsure as to how to set-up the rules of the alien device: it can cause power outages and drain energy from the city, yet it can also cause time pockets in school, featuring anything from a Gladiator up to a 2-minute sequence of a dinosaur entering the gym and the characters shooting at it. It is also unclear what must be done to stop the device, nor what would happen if the characters would just leave it working indefinitely, since there is no urgency because the authors forgot to set up the stakes. Moreover, when Mr. Roberts returns, he claims to have been sent to the 60s, and this would have almost worked as a subplot on its own. While not completely developed plot-wise, "My Science Project" still seems as a neat piece of entertainment which contains that 80s flair.
Grade:++
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