I TiVo’d it a few years ago off of IFC. I did enjoy it, because I could rewind as often as I wanted mid-showing, to help me keep track. It did get a little slow towards the end, when I no longer felt like rewinding to help it all make sense.
The complexity, the muffled audio, the whole indie feel improved it for me. I really felt like I could relate – these people have made an important discovery in their garage-based, circuit-board making, home-brewed materials science/nanotech facility. Maybe that’s too far-fetched, but some people do work hard on complex tasks in their garage – its sort of an American-dream type thing. You wouldn’t have expected Hank Hill to have traveled in time, but you can acknowledge the dedication leading to impressive results – that’s the sort of thing.
This was very similar to the vibe I got from The Blair Witch Project. On the face of it it seems fairly plausible, kids camping making a documentary, complete with low-budgetness to make it more “real” feeling, at least for me. By the time weird shit starts happening, you’re already invested. Then, the weirdness drags on for too long, and you snap out of both trances. But in the end, in both movies, you get another twist, and you get the feeling of – finally – done. Still a fairly nicely crafted ride.
I was mentioning bits of the plot to some people at work, and somebody went and spoiled the ending, it seems the final plot twist is directly taken from a Heinlein short story. So, if you like classic sci-fi, well, Primer is just one of those, filmed.
I’m thinking Cabin in the Woods may be similar in the way the plot advances, but I haven’t seen that yet. If so, perhaps the old classic sci-fi Cube from 1997 did it right – it didn’t try to be too real, just kept being weird, and short in duration.