Primer (2004)

Narrator: "They knew that the easiest way to be exploited is to sell something they did not yet understand."

By Shane Carruth
With Shane Carruth and David Sullivan

I first heard about Primer when I watched Upstream Color (2013) which was written and directed by Shane Carruth as well. I was intrigued by his style and I decided I should see his first and widely acclaimed first film Primer.

Four young engineering friends have come to create a device but they diverge on what real use it can have and what path they should take with their creation. While two of them slowly shy away from the project, the other two keep experimenting with it and realize the machine has some very intriguing scientific prospects. As they keep going further in the possibilities of their machine, their lives become more and more bizarrely hectic.

Primer is one of the hardest movies to get into, as we are bombarded in a technological world which we don't know anything about. We don't know what the characters are trying to achieve and their discussions are so narrowly scientific that it is impossible to follow for an every day person of my caliber, yet I can feel their emotions, what drives them and I can feel their thirst to explore this device.

Quickly, it becomes all that matters to them and by proxy it becomes all that matters to me. When you start grasping slowly what the device is about you are it with another massive surprise that also requires your brain to adjust to new data. This reaction brings another reaction and basically you are pulled into it while having nothing consistent to grasp your hands on, but you know it has the potential of being really interesting. In all honesty, I think it is the kind of movie that I probably would get a lot more on a second viewing because I would get focus on the little clues here and there instead of trying to gather the whole picture together all the time.

The movie is ultra low budget so there is not much to say about the actual directing; you can tell it's well done but it's not misleading or helping you out, it doesn't hold fancy shots, but it gets you into this world you don't fully understand yet feel compelled to grasp. These are both very good and annoying feelings in a movie: it's good because you realize the actual effort put into the writing and you know there is more than meets the eye, but it is also annoying because you feel like you don't have enough data, or time, to process what is going on a lot of the time.

The acting is restricted to a bare minimum with most of the movie being about the two main characters, Aaron and Abe.

I liked: Really mindbending. Interesting kind of sci-fi.

I disliked: Unsettling and very little data to work with. I probably didn't really get it.

63/100
It's a pretty cool look in a (pseudo) scientific world but it's definitely not an easy ride.