PrimerShane Carruth, the writer, director, co-star, producer, composer, co-cinematographer, editor, and probably best boy and key grip, made Primer for $7000. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Shane Carruth is living the filmmaker's dream! Synopsis: The movie is about some engineers who are trying to escape their Dilbertesque jobs by developing some profitable invention in their garage. Two of them discover that whatever it was they were trying to build, what they have accidentally created is a small time machine. They hide this news from the others, scale the device up to a person-sized time machine, and naturally, start day-trading stocks. Once they begin tampering with history, the movie becomes somewhat confusing. Carruth claims that he hasn't read any classic time travel stories, but if he had, the evident literary antecedents would be David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself and Robert Heinlein's By His Bootstraps. The Good: Carruth's engineers have a lot of verisimilitude and in many ways his time machine makes more sense than other movie time machines. The fact that he put a lot of thought into the time machine makes it quite plausible that the plot forms an intricate and logical whole when understood completely. The Bad: It's pretty hard to grasp that intricate and logical whole. When I stepped out of this movie I thought that I understood 80% of it but there was 20% I didn't get. From conversations and web-surfing since then, I realize that I understood less than I thought I did, maybe 60% at the time and 85% now. (In contrast, I followed all of, say, Memento in one viewing.) If there is anyone other than Shane Carruth who completely understands the plot of this movie, I have not seen their explanation posted to the Internet yet. I don't think most people understand the bleeding ear. (I have a theory about that.) I don't think most people understand the party. (My wife has a theory about that.) I don't think most people understand the degraded handwriting. (I'm baffled about that.) There is at least one scene in Primer in which the characters appear suffused with a funny color, and this could be some kind of effect of the time travel or it could be some cinematographic statement about the characters' inner sickness or something, but most likely it's an accidental side-effect of $7000 filmmaking. The plot is like that too. It's hard to know whether everything would come clear if you watched the movie again, or if there are parts that are just plain ungettable and this movie is a kind of hoax perpetrated on the Sundance Grand Jury. Carruth claimed in a Village Voice interview that the movie contains all the information you need to understand everything, except for how and why Thomas Granger traveled back in time, which must remain a subject for speculation. After reading that I'm willing to take him at his word and watch the movie again. But I've missed my chance for now, it's not playing in Santa Monica any more. |