When it comes to movies about time travel, getting a headache at some point is pretty much standard operating procedure. All of the jumping back and forth between alternate realities and distorted timelines and turning the straight march of time into something that more resembles a bowl of spaghetti – and that’s not even including the sometimes dense science required to make it all work – that’s almost a part of the genre’s appeal. You go in wanting your brain pleasantly discombobulated for a bit.

But while a good time travel movie toys with your brain, "Project Almanac" tortures it.

Soon into the new time travel thriller, I got a headache, and it wasn’t because of the film’s logic-bending, world-breaking corruption of the laws of time and space (though the movie does play quite fast and loose with its own rules). It was the fault of the actual filmmaking, namely the god-forsaken handheld found footage style that time cannot abandon in the past soon enough. In the case of most bad movies, I’m usually able to say at least it didn’t cause me physical pain, but "Project Almanac" manages to trip over that generously low critical bar. And that’s far from its only issue.

Serving as a bit of a time capsule itself (it was filmed all the way back in 2013), the long-delayed thriller stars Jonny Weston ("Chasing Mavericks") as David, a genius high school inventor dealing with the usual high school problems: a crummy car, awkwardness around girls, figuring out how to pay for college – MIT in his case. However, some help appears to be on the way, albeit in cryptic fashion. On an old videotape of his seventh birthday, David spots himself in the background looking at a mirror – all grown up. It’s either an incredible special effects job or there’s a time machine afoot.

For the sake of the movie, it’s the latter. David, alongside his always filming sister (Virginia Gardner) and his two doofy friends (Sam Lerner and Allen Evangelista), discover the parts and instructions to a time machine their long-deceased father left in the basement. Of course, they decide to put it together, accidentally adding David’s cool girl crush Jessie (Sofia Black-D’Elia) to the team along the way.

Finally, after seemingly half of the movie has gone by, the time machine is up and running. Being kids, they mostly use it on stupid stuff and having fun. They go back – several times – to ace a pop quiz. They win the lottery. They buy food trucks for their classmates ( … sure). And most notably, they spend a day watching Imagine Dragons at Lollapalooza – because when you have a time machine, why not go back in time to a concert event that comes around every year.

However, as one teammate dramatically proclaims to the sound of audience giggles, "Lollapalooza was a mistake!" That’s especially the case when David goes back to Lolla to fix a flirting fail with Jessie, coming back to discover the ripple effects suddenly causing havoc. Planes are now crashing. Star high school quarterbacks are now crippled. It’s up to David, dipping back and forth in time, to try and fix things – no matter how far back that means.

"Project Almanac" picks up some steam during these last act revelations, but it all breaks out far too late – seemingly with only 15 or 20 minutes left in the movie. The screenplay, written by Jason Harry Pagan and Andrew Deutschman, takes way too long to get to the actual time machine and even longer to get to the drama. Almost the entire first half of the film is spent with the not particularly compelling minutiae of building the contraption. Then the next 40 minutes is spent farting around in time, with David and Jessie’s burgeoning teen romance serving as closest thing to drama in sight.

It’s an glaringly unbalanced time travel movie oddly more interested in the tedium, and by the time the chaotic final 20 minutes roll around, the film doesn’t have enough time to get the audience on board with its leaps in logic. It’s often more confusing than compelling – not because of how complicated it is, but because it feels like the movie is making and breaking its own rules at a frantic clip.

It’s not as though the screenplay or the characters are particularly strong or engaging enough to merit dedicating 80 percent of the running time to tinkering and pattering about either. Weston is the best actor of the bunch; he’s stiff but still at least likable. None of the other leading girls or goofballs register much at all. The script doesn’t help, filled with leaden dialogue like someone saying, "I’m getting scared" right before bending the laws of space and time like no human being before.

While Pagan and Deutschman pack in a couple of references to time travel movies past ("Looper," for one, gets a shout-out), they’re more decoration than anything. The real inspirations for "Project Almanac" are unfortunately much more dubious: Michael Bay (unsurprisingly, Bay’s company Platinum Dunes is a producer here) and found footage movies. So if you’ve been begging for a found footage movie as directed by the mastermind behind "Transformers," here’s your horrifying, horrifying dream come true.

First-timer Dean Israelite is technically the director, but most of the Bay-isms are here. David’s sister – an utter non-character; a token attempt to give her a bullying subplot is almost comically lazy – is leeringly introduced cleavage first, and during the trip to Lolla, Israelite seems more concerned with ogling his lead females and capturing a water-soaked bikini-clad dude fantasy than continuity (characters are wearing backstage passes before they’re introduced a scene or two later).

So Bay’s Red Bull-soaked misogyny is present, and speaking of Red Bull, so is the obvious product placement. And it wouldn’t be a Michael Bay movie without feeling needlessly long and bloated.

Unfortunately, Bay’s one almost redeeming calling card – his distinct visual flair – is missing in action completely. In fact, the curse of found footage somehow looks worse here than usual. The movie is headache-inducingly shot, with the director constantly shaking the camera (the introduction of a tripod had me sacrificing animals out of thanks), mixing in choppy edits and framing even the most mundane conversations way too close. That’s the problem with the found footage concept: In lazy hands, it’s an excuse to make an awful looking movie, one where you don’t have to care about framing or lighting or composing a decent shot.

Even more annoying is that it’s a crappy looking movie solely for the sake of making a cheap, crappy looking movie. The respectable found footage entries – "Cloverfield," "The Blair Witch" – at least feigned reasons for why people were recording things; here, there’s no story-driven reason at all.

The script doesn’t even try to fit it into the story naturally. Near the middle, David pointlessly notes to his sister, "From now on, record everything," as though she wasn’t already. When David is about to suggest robbing the school for supplies, he asks to turn the camera off, which makes sense … if only they didn’t have it back on during the robbery itself. The camera manages to pick up audio inside a car cleanly from outside, and conversations from dozens of feet away sound pristine. Fun fact: The zoom feature on a camera does not apply to the microphone.

Between its clear Bay influence and found footage gimmick, Israelite's movie represents the worst of today’s big budget Hollywood filmmaking meeting the worst of today’s low budget Hollywood filmmaking – plus an added dash of its own special brand of ineptitude. A pro tip to the me of the past seeing "Project Almanac": Bring Advil, and hope for a better tomorrow.