Making Audiences Think
Primer Aims High and Ultimately Fails

Primer, the new film from writer/director Shane Carruth, is a film designed to make the audience think. Based on the simple premises of scientific invention and greed, the story asks how two friends would react to stumbling across one of the most important discoveries in history. While the science is interesting, the execution of this film experiment produces mixed results.

Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) are two engineers who (with two other friends) have a small side-business selling inventions out of their garage. These guys are the classic garage nerds, tinkering with interesting projects that they hope will some day pay off in a big way. What occurs with a new experiment is an unexpected by-product, a residual fungus that (according to a lab that analyzes it) should have taken a LONG time to build up. So Aaron does some checking and discovers some other strange side effects to the experiment, like the fact that it stops drawing power even though it is still running.

Aaron and Abe soon realize that this device affects time, which they prove by sending a stop watch from the present to the future and back again in short order. Soon the guys are trying to devise a way to enter the loop at point B, for the return trip back in time to point A .

As any heartless self-serving greedy person would do, the friends instantly scheme to get rich from this invention. They research stocks that perform well during the day, go back in time to the morning and buy those stocks while their prices are low. By the end of the day, they have profited well. But the rules of time travel require them to lock themselves away in a hotel every day to avoid running into themselves. The adventure begins to become routine and soon (as expected) mistakes are made.

But Primer is not a cautionary tale about making mistakes when dealing with nature's irrefutable laws. The conflict in the story is less tangible than that, making the story difficult to follow. There doesn't seem to be a good explanation for the last act of the film, and I found myself wondering if I had blinked and missed something important.

Normally, I enjoy thinking while (and after) viewing a film, but I prefer to think about the ideas put forth or understanding the imagery being used. For example, I have spent hours (and multiple viewings) trying to understand the bulk of David Lynch's work. But the story of Primer goes from interesting, to difficult, to indecipherable.

From the beginning I watched and listened carefully, understanding that this story would be difficult to follow. I fully expected to have some challenge following any plot thread that dealt with time reversal. But once I lost my tenuous hold of that thread, I found myself unable to pick it up again. Like juggling chainsaws, one slip and it was all over.

After seeing this, I was certain that the only people who would find it entertaining would be the science nerds who would watch it over and over to nitpick the problems with the physics of it. Instead, it seems to have been embraced by the pseudo-intelligentsia who are afraid to admit that the Emperor has no clothes. It boggles my mind that this film did so well at the Sundance Film Festival. Those who praised it need to admit that they didn't get it. There's no shame in not understanding a poor film.

MY RATING: 3 out of 10.

RATED: PG-13
RUN TIME: 78 min.