PRIMER: a Primer

It's been far too long since I walked out of a movie in head-scratching, mind-racing wonderment, and I'd almost forgotten what it felt like. PRIMER is, in a nutshell, heavy. And you should really see it, if nothing else, to marvel in what can a guy can do with a camera, a skeleton crew, and an incredible amount of both imagination and style. It's one of the most beautifully photographed films I've seen in ages, and the fact that it was done by a cinematic newbie with nothing else under his belt is as much a cause for amazement as the film itself. I walked out of PRIMER wishing to hell that I'd done it.

That said, it's vague to the point of being obtuse, and nearly impossible to get your head around on the first viewing. What follows is my take on things--don't bother to read further until you've seen it, if you're planning on it, as I'd hate to spoil things.

That said, this is my summation of PRIMER:

Two men, Abe and Aaron, toil away in their garage attempting to create, out of whatever's available, a device that will change the gravitational field around a given object and change their financial straits by attracting venture capital cash up the wazoo. In a series of scenes that pretty much sums up the thrill of working for a guerrilla DIY startup, they tear apart everything from a refrigerator to Abe's car for material, ending up with a metal box that not only lessens the weight of a little toy Weeble, but also, they soon discover, sends said Weeble into a recursive time loop. Think of a street with a cul-de-sac at both ends, says Aaron, with one end being the present, and the other end being a point some number of hours ago, with the number of hours dependent on the length of time their gizmo's been running in the garage.

Now, says Aaron, imagine if the Weeble was smart enough to get out of the machine when it was in the other cul-de-sac. And soon they're building a larger machine. And soon they're building another.

PRIMER deals with the mechanics of time-travel like DAS BOOT dealt with daily life on a submarine: this is the nuts and bolts, here, where you've got to drive two cars to the place where you've stored your time machine, so that your future self doesn't have to catch a cab when he pops fifteen minutes after you've turned on the machine and left.

That probably doesn't make much sense: it didn't to me either. Think of it this way: Aaron goes and turns on the machine at 8 in the morning, then holes up in a hotel room until 5 so that he doesn't have a close encounter with an alternate self. At 5, he drives back to where the machine is, climbs in, and climbs out at 8:15, having travelled back several hours and missed himself by fifteen minutes. Now he needs a ride. You get it?

That's the ball that filmmaker Shane Carruth takes and runs with, and the level of thought he's put into it is both frightening and a dead-on imitation of what two intelligent amateur businessmen desperate for cash would come up with. They rule out the easy idea of lottery numbers, going for the long-term payoff of the stock market and betting March Madness games over a one-time cash windfall. And then they get deeper and deeper, as they go back to correct the past mistakes they've made, and their alternate selves go back further to correct the corrections. Soon other people are popping up who've somehow gotten in the machine sometime in the future, and Abe and Aaron are stuck trying to figure out where exactly they lost control. And somewhere along the way, I think someone comes up with the idea of building a time machine with a time machine, and from there it all REALLY goes sideways.

Like I said, it's heavy stuff, bewildering and deliriously entertaining at the same time. As one who's wasted delightful hours trying to figure out all the stuff about time-travel that BACK TO THE FUTURE missed, I dug the hell out of it.