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Primer
(2004)
Dir: Shane Carruth
It’s unlikely that I will be able to figure this movie out from the memory of a single viewing. What I remember is a gaggle of Wozniaks working out of a friend’s garage in their spare time, trying to come up with some breakthrough, scientific invention. Two of them, Andrew and Abe (Carruth and David Sullivan), stumble upon a primitive technique for reverse time travel. Rather than share the discovery with their buddies, they set up a larger-scale version and use it to make money off of stocks and sports betting. The problem is that each time they travel back in time, they create doubles of themselves. These doubles end up fucking up an otherwise simple plan.
The storytelling is highly fractured, and the logistics of everything that’s going on are rarely broken down into the simplest terms. It can be frustrating, but it’s a rare movie that is able to raise not only the question of how quickly and for what reasons would you fuck over your best friend, but of how quickly and for what gain you would do the same to yourself, literally. The movie kind of reinvents itself as the doubles swell upon one another. The friends are rapidly forced to reexamine their motives and the tail-spinning ramifications of what they’ve unleashed, and the film shifts from sprite sci-fi to brooding noir. Calling to mind Memento, confusing and persuasive storytelling, and fine acting, sturdily surmount a complete lack of special effects. The mind-fuckingness-of-time-travel quotient lies somewhere south of Somewhere in Time and north of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, while the overall “damn-bro-what-the” measures in slightly above the first Matrix.
This movie was made for under $7,000, which is most incredible considering that it is something of a science-fiction opus. Primer also maintains an ironic hyper-awareness of it’s limited budget throughout, which makes it even more charming. The time-travel machine that the friends set up for themselves is in a U-haul garage, and in an earlier scene, the friends plunge their own cars and refrigerators for components rather than buying them at Wal Mart.
Primer will be most soundly appreciated by the MIT students who craft a drinking game wherein beer is gulped each time the space-time continuum is broken. Considering that about eighty-percent of the dialogue could have been written by one of their baked professors, this seems a likely scenario. Some sort of lexicon of scientific jargon would be helpful to laypersons, but nearly impossible to employ.
The manufactured grandeur and impact of Sky Capitan and the World of Tomorrow are undeniable, but it’s inspiring that a movie with more ingenuity but a sliver of the budget has been released in the same year. Despite the hugeness of it’s concepts, Primer moves swiftly. Best not to show up to this movie late. And try not to blink either.
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