Primer 111
The informal engineering group has evidently come up with at least one minor success; in the movie's opening scenes (with just a touch of foreboding narration hinting that not is all as it appears), the four are spending a late evening around the kitchen table of Aaron's suburban house, which could be anywhere in Silicon Valley's version of middle-class neighborhoods, or in one of the country's other tech hotbeds. (According to the credits, the movie is actually filmed around Dallas.) They're stuffing padded envelopes with a device the size of a hard drive, and arguing technical and financial details of their next project. It's a tense interchange; the players are frustrated with each other, and it's clear they might not even want to pursue a single project as a foursome.
The dialog here and throughout is sharp; not comic like the trio of lead characters in Office Space, but with the same sense of frustrated white-collar ambition. The jargon (hip-and-hopeful engineerspeak) can be a bit grating, but it flows perfectly and realistically.
The conversation continues in snippets over the next several days or weeks, with arguments over who holds patents, and whether there's an easier way to achieve temperatures low enough for superconduction in parts of the next device. Aaron and Abe are the core of the group, it seems, and the more committed to working with each other; they keep working on it as a pair, ignoring the other two for a time.
The details of what they're really hoping to make are left fuzzy, to say the least; the audience mostly sees haggling and bickering over fine points; whether the palladium is necessary, whether cheaper parts could be substituted, and so on. Visits to machine shops and diagram-driven arguments reveal that they're building something which will emit some kind of field from small plates facing the inside of a rotating mechanism, inside an argon-flooded box.
The two discover that the tabletop mechanism they've been cobbling together has some strange properties. The first clue: once its rotating parts are in motion, disconnecting the car batteries that feed it doesn't make the machine shut off as it should. The machine's motion gradually dies down, but only after minutes of inexplicable motion. Was it simply a bad measurement, or did they they just extract more energy than they'd applied? A type of mold which builds up in the mechanism as they continue to tweak it makes things even stranger; they take a sample to an acquaintance trained in biology; he declares their story of its origin "a joke." The amount of mold they've been cleaning out of the mechanism every few days, he explains, should have taken years -- not days -- to accumulate.
From here, the pace picks up in several ways: inspired by the rapid mold growth, Abe decides to put his watch into the machine, and finds that time seems to have passed within the field much faster than outside it. He and Aaron repeat the experiment, increasingly excited. The obvious ensues, and soon (after literally locking out both Phillip and Robert, making some quick ethical calculations that might not hold up in a patent suit), Abe and Aaron not only determine how to reverse the transit of time within their device, but construct a version big enough for a person to fit inside.
The rest of the film grows more ambiguous and confusing, though no less entertaining. The ambiguity is necessary for the film to move forward: if the bull-session logic of time-travel were fully explored, and every logical contradiction examined minutely, the narrator might drop out of existence, the opening scene itself might start to loop, and the characters might disappear one by one as the hypothetical past circumstances of their interactions were altered. However, the line is drawn such that the story gets told without bogging down in the inherent paradoxes; instead, the problems with crossing time paths pop up just enough to keep things interesting -- which is guaranteed to happen when the past and present instances of each character start to do more than simply observe each other from a distance.
The first Doppelgaenger appearance is shown by Abe to Aaron; Abe wanted to gradually reveal his already implemented plan to put the full-size machine in a place that met their need for an inconspicuous, windowless, climate-controlled home for the device. He decided on the local storage-rental facility (which drew some laughs from the audience). Through binoculars, he allows Aaron a glimpse of his alter ego passing through the doors of the facility with an oxygen tank.
A second machine soon lets both characters travel back and forth simultaneously, breathing from oxygen tanks inside their argon-flooded boxes. At first, both characters spend their time in the past isolated in a hotel room, watching TV and eating junk food, slowly convincing themselves that nothing catastrophic seems to result, that the world goes on just as it always has. Their caution gives way to optimism, and they come up with an easier way to make Big Money: look up stock results in the present day at a small-town library where they're unlikely to interact with anyone they know, and buy index funds shares -- in the recent past -- in funds they know are about to rise. (With index funds, they realize, the gains would be less conspicuous than single stocks, despite the tempation for quicker gains.)
The pair start living killingly long days; 24 hours, of course, have to be accounted for in the world of conventional time, and the rest in the recent past. By carpooling and calling in sick days, they contrive ways to conceal the double life.
If your system of belief suspension allows you to enjoy the movie so far, things get even more interesting. Despite their attempts to simply keep a low profile, avoid conversations with people they might see in their ordinary life, and so on, Aaron and Abe inevitably let their guard down, and then choose to ignore caution altogether when it means (they think) saving a life.
The interactions of past selves and present selves grows more sinister, and eventually downright treacherous. Who (and when) each character really is gets ever more difficult to sort out, for the characters as well as for the audience. The filmmakers have a clever idea of how a motivated and unscrupulous time-traveler might try to resolve the problem of tangling different time slices.
I suspect Primer will catch on, whether or not it soon reaches wide release. It's edgy in the same way as The Conversation . Primer comes much closer to the mind-tweaking of a Philip K. Dick story than this year's Paycheck did; while Paycheck was actually based on a Dick short story, it was dolled up and stretched for the big screen and in the process lost the original story's spare feel.
The technical goofs (some rough editing in spots, and an orangish cast, at least in the print shown in Portland) are easy to look past, and may even increase the creepy noir feeling. (Shane Carruth wrote and directed the film, and produced it on a budget of just $7,000; for that, a few choppy frames are hard to complain about.) The plot, too, has some rough edges (get out your time-travel dilemma blinders, and be prepared for some Star Trek-style technical doublespeak). On the whole, though, Primer is taut, smart, and well worth seeing.
Movie Fans . question. (Score:3, Interesting)
There must be a ton of movies for them to choose from .
3.3 on imdb... (Score:2, Interesting)
according to imdb and 119 votes, it received a 3.3
hmmmm....
Garage tech and barriers to entry (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to sound discouraging - there are always ways bright entrepeneurs outwit big money, but doing so with practically none of their own is getting unrealistic as the IT industry matures. VCs and angel funders can help close the gap, but that of course comes with a steep price later on should things work out.
Re:If it is so good, then why... (Score:4, Interesting)
If we ignore the 40 votes of 1 and 2 (these are probably idiots anyway), then the mean is 8.1 and the median is 9.
Re:3.3 on imdb... (Score:4, Interesting)
Strange Plot? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, why did they want to go back to past and buy index funds? Can't they just go forward and 'predict' a lottery number?
If going back to the past is the only option, here's one way to do it:
1. Rent a place to build the machine
2. Wait for 1-2 months to past
3. Move built machine to the rented place
4. Go back to 1-2 months
5. Interact with yourselves as much as you want since your past-self already know you're coming
6. Tell him/her to buy whatever index funds.
7. (Obligatory) Profit!!
Re:If it is so good, then why... (Score:1, Interesting)
Just look at the user reviews of the movie. All the positive reviews are by people who have never commented on a movie before. All the negative reviews are from people who have reviewed lots of other films.
It happens all the time on IMDB, people trying to promote their own movies and its pretty easy to spot if you know what you are looking for.
Re:I remember my time machine.... (Score:3, Interesting)
a fantastic movie (Score:5, Interesting)
You remember the first time you saw The Matrix (please, not the awful sequels) and you could barely keep up with what was going on, trying to piece together the pieces of what you were being told into a coherent story?
This movie was exactly like that. The first half or so is fairly linear (despite the frenzied Altman-esque style of everyone talking on top of each other), but then it gets WEIRD and it just absolutely blew me away. This film won a major Sundance award, and normally that means I won't like it (especially the normally pandering audience award winners) but this movie, and first-time filmmaker Shane Carruth, deserves absolutely everything it gets. I am just blown away.
Did you like Pi? If so, go see this one.
By the way, the attention to detail in the beginning is great. Often in thrillers with technical content, if you have a technical education you have consciously ignore all the stupid movie crud that they pull to make it into a good story. But this movie pulls off an incredibly believable technical story, with only a few distracting gaffs. That is, the tech jargon is good enough that you don't get distracted and can focus on the story line.
Final comment: Yes, it is very hard to follow the story line in this movie.
Obviously I'm not going to spoil it, but I think the following fact will help when the movie gets kind of hairy towards the end: Aaron is the dark-haired guy, Abe is the blond-haired guy.
This movie now has distribution and you should keep an eye out for it in the fall.
I hope it's better than The Matrix. (Score:3, Interesting)
And that pretty much ruined it for me.
Because when I watched it, I saw a great straight-forward superhero movie with virtual reality as the superhero schtick. The bit where Neo has to be beat up and brought to the edge of death to gain his super powers is straight out of Anime, and there was no more than the usual annoying amount of bad science. Good movie, but all the build up had me looking for the REAL plot twists, the ones that never came. By the end I was waiting for them to reveal that the "Real World" was another level of simulation, or something equally impressive.
So...
I sure hope that Primer is really complex and hard to follow, and it's not just a matter of reviewers who aren't familiar with the time-travel genre freaking out about it. I'd hate to be disappointed like that again.
Ugh. More morally ambiguous asshole characters. (Score:3, Interesting)
--I'm thinking of "Being John Malkovich", "Cube", "Memento" and that film shot in Edmonton about office workers living and working in a mall/office complex who bet they can stay indoors for 100 days, (and which I forget the name of.)
All very clever, but sheesh! Don't Good Guys get to be in funky films once in a while? Any film which makes me hate the main characters loses at least one and a half stars just because I can't stand assholes and creeps in real life. If a Bad Guy is in a film, then he'd better get punched, shot, blown up, or horribly embarrassed, and he'd most certainly better not be the main character!
Bad guys aren't any fun to watch. They make me feel ill, and that's not why I pay the price of admission.
"Office Space", had a Good Guy for a main character. I wonder if that had anything to do with its success.
-FL
John Titor! (Score:1, Interesting)
Was he one of this movie's producers? Who knows?
problems with indy films... (Score:3, Interesting)
either the director/crew are stuck in the hollywierd though train of "mmmmm money! we'll be rich we better not let people see it!" or they dont care, just made it for the festival rounds and never EVER release it as a loq quality online version or sell a DVD/VHS of it.
I make my fils to entertain and to show them to people.
Why is it that it seems that I am the exception and not the rule?