Travelling through time is a tricky business, especially when the time-travel machine was invented purely by accident, and you don't really know much about how it works, or how its misuse might affect your own future. Just days after I enjoyed Richard Schenkman's excellent 'The Man from Earth (2007),' low-budget cinema has presented me with another fascinating foray into science-fiction, a film that uses ten times the brain-power expended on your latest blockbuster
and with one millionth of the budget! 'Primer (2004)' was the brainchild of first-time director/writer/actor/producer/editor/composer Shane Carruth, who makes little effort to dumb-down the film's scientific jargon to cater for the less knowledgeable viewer, without ever treating its audience with condescension or pretension. Because the film's main characters understand just as little as we do, we feel as though we are all in the same boat, just waiting for their naive, deceptively-straightforward schemes to go awry.
Filmed on a meagre budget of US$7,000, 'Primer' defies its ultra low-budget roots, and reeks with slick professionalism. Indeed, the film certainly looks as though it was shot cheaply, occasionally making use of a shaky hand-held camera, but this, oddly enough, only contributes to the effectiveness of the story. As 'Primer' takes a purely scientific approach to time-travel {resisting the common temptation of inventing a fantastical, unexplained device a "flux capacitor," for example for the sake of simplicity}, it is imperative that the film feels factual, and the pedestrian, documentary-like realism of the cinematography keeps us firmly grounded in the real world. Fluorescent lighting, non-neutral color temperatures, high-speed film stock and camera filters, when required, do nicely to set the mood, and are about the most sophisticated special effects employed at any point during the film. The two main actors, Shane Carruth and David Sullivan, both do a very good job in their debut performances, with their acting never feeling forced or tentative, despite occupying the screen for nearly one hundred percent of the total running time.
'Primer' is a film relatively well-known for its unfathomability, the fractured narrative structure only contributing to the complexity of Carruth's story. Being an time-travel enthusiast myself {prior to watching this film, I had spent the last two days boring my co-workers with my opinions on the Grandfather Paradox}, I felt pretty confident that I would be perfectly capable of following the narrative from beginning to end. The story remained completely coherent in the opening two acts in which Aaron and Abe invent the time machine, and then use it to play the stock market as long as the timeline (apparently) remained self-consistent. However, as soon as a third party was found to be using the machine, I completely lost it. The final act, though convoluted and perhaps deliberately-incomprehensible, nonetheless remains a fascinating puzzle, and one that I'm sure will fall into place once I find the time to rewatch the film. As for now, all I can do is offer an enthusiastic thumbs-up recommendation, and smugly pretend that I understood more than I actually did.
Filmed on a meagre budget of US$7,000, 'Primer' defies its ultra low-budget roots, and reeks with slick professionalism. Indeed, the film certainly looks as though it was shot cheaply, occasionally making use of a shaky hand-held camera, but this, oddly enough, only contributes to the effectiveness of the story. As 'Primer' takes a purely scientific approach to time-travel {resisting the common temptation of inventing a fantastical, unexplained device a "flux capacitor," for example for the sake of simplicity}, it is imperative that the film feels factual, and the pedestrian, documentary-like realism of the cinematography keeps us firmly grounded in the real world. Fluorescent lighting, non-neutral color temperatures, high-speed film stock and camera filters, when required, do nicely to set the mood, and are about the most sophisticated special effects employed at any point during the film. The two main actors, Shane Carruth and David Sullivan, both do a very good job in their debut performances, with their acting never feeling forced or tentative, despite occupying the screen for nearly one hundred percent of the total running time.
'Primer' is a film relatively well-known for its unfathomability, the fractured narrative structure only contributing to the complexity of Carruth's story. Being an time-travel enthusiast myself {prior to watching this film, I had spent the last two days boring my co-workers with my opinions on the Grandfather Paradox}, I felt pretty confident that I would be perfectly capable of following the narrative from beginning to end. The story remained completely coherent in the opening two acts in which Aaron and Abe invent the time machine, and then use it to play the stock market as long as the timeline (apparently) remained self-consistent. However, as soon as a third party was found to be using the machine, I completely lost it. The final act, though convoluted and perhaps deliberately-incomprehensible, nonetheless remains a fascinating puzzle, and one that I'm sure will fall into place once I find the time to rewatch the film. As for now, all I can do is offer an enthusiastic thumbs-up recommendation, and smugly pretend that I understood more than I actually did.