Primer, a movie that gets me (a geek)

Most movies I enjoy leave me entertained, and in some rare situations intrigued or moved. Primer is the only instance of a movie I've ever watched that left me wholly fascinated. It's a really well put together piece of art, and addresses a subject which is usually reserved for cheesy B movies: time travel. Primer is anything but a cheesy B movie, it's a work of genius. The only "downside" to this work of genius, is that it's nearly impossible for most people to understand it upon the first viewing, and many people will never be able to comprehend it.

Most traditional films that address the topic of time travel trivialize the science that is backing the idea, mainly because it's not real science. It is, by definition, fiction. Take for example Back to the Future. It presents a wholly absurd scenario explained through pseudo scientific terms. You drive some kind of nuclear powered car through a lightning strike at just the right speed, at the right time, and you can go back in time. For most audiences, just throwing in words like "Plutonium" or "Gigawatt" will appease them and they brush of the miracle, having faith that the "scientific stuff" takes care of it. Even those of you who might have enjoyed this movie probably can't remember much about the explanation for how the car actually manages to go back in time. Other films have surpassed this method as well though, such as Donnie Darko, which I did enjoy quite a bit. But even the philosophical and supernatural explanation for how time travel works in this film trivializes the actual implementation of it, however well orchestrated the presentation may have been. Primer takes a completely different approach to addressing these issues, it comes up with a scenario in real scientific research where time travel is accidentally discovered. Now that idea in itself would be open to quite a bit of vagueness. But for any of you engineering buffs out there, or those of you who are familiar with some of the more prominent and scientifically grounded theories on time travel, you'll find that the movie provides a very believable corollary to some of these. Of course some degree of vagueness has to be introduced, because they obviously haven't created a real time travel machine, and can't spell out the technical details of how it works. What is done extremely well though, is the explanation of how their proposed project works, and the details of how their accidental side effect (time traveling) comes to light. Nothing is "dumbed down", and this is in large part due to the influence of the person who created this movie: Shane Carruth.

Shane Carruth

I think probably the most ridiculous part of this whole movie is that one person completed all aspects of production. When I say all aspects, I mean all aspects: writing, directing, producing, creating music for, editing, starring in, negotiating distribution and casting.

The whole thing was produced for a mere $7000, it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004, and the Alfred P. Sloan award that same year. It was eventually picked up by ThinkFilm for distribution.

Accolades aside, an entire movie which is produced and distributed being managed and created from top to bottom by one person is an incredible feat. I can't help but feeling like I'm actually getting to look inside the mind of Shane every time I see it.

Primer's best and worst quality: obfuscation

The movie gets really convoluted about 20 minutes into the film. After our characters have worked out that they now have a time travel machine we start running into things like multiple time-lines, multiple "copies" of characters interacting with each other and to top it all off, the scenes are displayed out of order. Making the situation of an unordered chronology even more complicated is the fact that the scenes appear to be in order, but in reality they are spliced together from different scenarios which occur after the main characters have traveled through the time machine. None of this really becomes apparent until near the end of the movie, and if you're not watching closely it's completely possible to skip over the fact that things have been arranged like this. Top that all off with the scientific jargon at the beginning of the movie, and you have a film which appeals pretty well to the nerd crowd.

Final thoughts

I'm not going to go into my explanation for what exactly happens in the movie, because I think figuring that out is what makes it so great. I encourage anyone who is reading this to get on Amazon and order a copy, come up with your own conclusions. If you want a little more information about the movie, I set up a lens for it over at Squidoo, so check out the Primer Movie lens there. Let me know what you think!