Day 70: Primer (2004)

I've heard people discuss Primer before, and read of it on various must-see Sci-Fi film lists online, but for whatever reason never got around to it. Now that I have, my head hurts.

The plot of this film is possibly one of the most complex plots ever filmed, and I'm pretty sure people who have seen it hundreds of times are still only guessing. The gist of the film is that two guys create a time-machine that allows them to live a day, then go into the machine and live it again, but this time knowing the outcome of the events of the day. While they use this to play the stock market at first, they start experimenting and things get complicated. After having watched the film, I read the Wikipedia synopsis 5 or 10 times and still don't fully understand. I studied the very detailed (and confusing) timeline that is all over the Internet, and am still confused. I get the general gist of what happened, but I couldn't explain it and do not fully understand. It's not a movie you can fully understand.

Considering the film was shot for $7,000 and Shane Carruth wrote, produced, directed and stared in the film, it's quite the achievement. This is a far stretch from some film school film project, it's sci-fi film that demonstrates the truly confusing nature of trying to use time travel in film. Sure the film is often out of focus, not always white-balanced, a lot of dialogue is muffled and hard to understand, they use technical terms without explanation, and most importantly the film lacks continuity. Yet, while these things would normally ruin any other movie, they work for Primer. The film works because it seems real - it portrays normal, almost wooden, scientists because that's what they'd be in real life. Inventions are just as likely, if not more so, to come from someone's garage then from some large lab, so why not make a movie that demonstrates this?

At the end of the day, there is no hero to cheer for, there is no moral, there is no message, and there is no costly special effects. The film is simple in its approach, and honest, and because of this, it's easy to accept it in all its confusion.