This is I think what made the film for me: the use of one grand hypothetical to provide a new angle on (essentially) old questions. This is a venerable sci-fi tradition, and I think at the heart of much of the greatest sci-fi (another recent offering in that vein was The Man from Earth). Contrast this with a movie like Looper: there, time travel is a gadget, nothing more, and when we’re in danger of starting to think about it, the film explicitly tells us not to, and rather enjoy the cool and stylish ways people get shot in the face. As a result, Looper is a boring mess, while Primer—though far from perfect—at least manages to raise your interest.
This thread is a good reminder that there is a reason things like Transformers make money.
Primer is absolutely fantastic. Some of us like to be challenged.
I love Transformers and Primer.
Hah. My feelings on primer is a perfect amalgamation of all the separate individual opinions on the movie.
pros: As Bo said, it’s a fantastic example of limited storytelling. It forces you to pay attention to details. Furthermore it deals with time travel the complicated way - not BTTF way. Things have to be timed out, the paradoxes have to be avoided, a simple time-travel plan - requires precise planning and execution. It’s not as simple as just hopping into a delorean, making out with your mom, and dumping manure on some douchebag.
cons: It’s a very interesting movie but if you don’t care much for the time travel logic, it’s a fairly boring movie. The pacing is off, and the lighting is poor. The characters aren’t fleshed out enough (perhaps purposely), and if you miss a detail here or there you’re completely screwed. It’s also fairly overrated. Nobody should say this is their FAVORITE movie.
However, it’s my favorite portrayal of time travel in movies ever, and it has an argument for being the best time travel movie ever. For that alone you should at least respect the movie, if not enjoy it. The budget aspect should also cut it a lot of slack - like exponentially more slack.
Oh. And it’s much better than Donnie Darko. Maybe I’ll start a new thread asking for all the love of DD. There are a lot more Darko fans than Primer fans, that’s for damn sure.
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People who I have compared notes with who love the movie love it, as you say above, because of how it portrays time travel practically and as a device to explore choices we make.
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Donnie Darko = Primer + American Beauty
Yes, Primer is better. 
My wife and I saw this film at a screening with the filmmakers, but I can’t say we were impressed enough to want to see it again. So I don’t know if this is mentioned on the Director’s Commentary on the DVD, but the whole thing was shot on 35mm bits of unexposed film left over on the roll after a major film shoot. Every scene was planned based on the amounts of available footage on each stub, with only a single take possible. They said they just kept rehearsing a scene over and over (film is expensive, actors are cheap) until they could be sure that their one take was perfect. Any apparent errors or talking over? Intentional.
One problem with this is that, making sure that people can read the lines perfectly tends to stomp the life out of any performance, especially when you’re dealing with non-professional actors.
I think they were fools to do this in 35mm. The cost of the film meant that they couldn’t experiment or re-take. HD would have enabled them to have much more flexibility.
I just woke up from a nap, so maybe I’m a little fuzzy on things, but I don’t think that HD was a viable option for a guy with $7000 in 2003.
I haven’t seen it in a year or more, but I remember loving it, and I’ve seen it multiple times.
Yes, the production quality isn’t great, but that’s 7k in 2003. I think it’s really pretty impressive given the constraints. What struck me is the amount of thought that went into the time travel plot. Not the scientific mechanics of HOW one goes about time travel, but the effects and paradoxes within the rules that the universe in the movie has set up. It begs repeat viewings, and internet analysis. And unlike some other time-travel movies, the analysis seems to hold up - after you think it through and watch multiple times, it makes sense. Internally consistent, I suppose.
Really, it’s a well-thought out film on all counts. Plot, and general execution. The fact that they had to budget and scrimp, using leftover film, means that most every scene counts.
The guy behind this movie has a new film that was at Sundance (or another recent festival?) to pretty good reviews, coming out in a few weeks. I’m intrigued.
It’s called Upstream Color. I think it’s shown at a few festivals, I saw it at South by Southwest. It’s unique to say the least. It might be less confusing than Primer, since there isn’t time traveling, but it is harder to describe. He did spend more money this time and it shows; it looked beautiful.
Then rent a BetaCam SP. Whatever. It looked like shit anyway. They way they did it, they had no ability to monitor or fix anything.
Hmmm. Turns out that the film was not shot on left-over 35mm film after all.
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I know this is an old thread but I just saw this on Netflix. I didn’t have a problem with the production style and dialog; I found that interesting. Up to a point, I understood the time travel scheme and the possible paradoxes. I found the story interesting and intriguing up to the point where it descended into an incoherency worse than season 2 of True Detective.
This was around the point where the two protagonists were being followed by somebody’s father with two days growth of beard and they figured out that he had time traveled somehow. Then one of them gets out of the car, there’s some sort of chase with someone shouting “what are you doing here?” which culminated in a backyard with people lying on the ground followed by a closeup of a hand reaching menacingly towards something. From there it got worse and somehow ended up with the two in an airport talking about running away to a different country (why?) and how they had no money (what happened to it?). Then one of them is shown addressing a group of people in English in some industrial setting (Star City, I think), alongside a guy addressing the group in French. I’m guessing that he’s now a tourguide. What was the fate of the other guy?To me, it’s a potentially good movie that was ruined by a confusing ending.
I watched it last weekend. It somehow managed to draw my attention, which was all for naught since it was so confusing.
I think its appeal is in the confusion, though. It’s like a puzzle that you can only solve by watching it a bunch of times and relying on this website to explain everything. Some people are into that kind of stuff. Personally, I am not. I don’t mind watching a film more than once (I had to do that with Memento). But a plot that is so convoluted that you must have a fanboy interpret it for you? Yeah, that sounds like a film failure to me, not a masterpiece.
I also didn’t care for any of the characters–including the one we never get to see.
But the premise of their time traveling is interesting. I wouldn’t watch it again, but it wasn’t the worse 1.5 hours in the world.
I forgot to mention that I watched this movie after having watch Lunopolis, another movie on Netflix about time travel. That movie wasn’t nearly as confusing (though it was still confusing), and it had slightly better production. But like “Primer”, it was also kind of disappointing for me–despite the rave reviews it got.
I’ve come to the realization that if your time traveling movie doesn’t involve Marty McFly or Morlocks, I’m probably not going to be able to understand what’s going on.
Sanity! At last!
IIRC (it’s been years) he wasn’t a tourguide, he was, I thought, about to begin directing them in the construction of a larger scale version of the time machine.
The scene with the guy with the beard growth is indeed a WTF moment and I never was able to fit it in with the rest of the story–but I don’t see the point of this movie as “making everything fit together.” It’s really more a story about how these two guys react to a bunch of WTF moments that only just barely make sense usually, not really a story about how to deal with time travel.
I assimilate a movie like this to stories from the Cthulu mythos, believe it or not. You don’t have to understand everything about something in order to realize that it is horrible and will destroy the very fundamentals of your reality.
Also, I assimilate it to things like the novel Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, which btw if you haven’t read it is damn good, but which is so chock full of obscure historical and literary references that if you spend your time trying to understand each one you’ll miss the actual story and what it’s about.
I agree with Bo.
I haven’t watched it more than once. I was willing to accept that it had “beat” me, and I respected its ability to do that. I didn’t feel like I didn’t catch everything because it was poorly done, but because the author had out-thought me. I would probably also enjoy having someone kick my ass at chess, masterfully, or force me to vomit while somersaulting in a F-14. If it’s cool enough, being taken out by the more skilled party is fine.
It’s not a favorite film. I would rather watch Donnie Darko or Memento and I do believe that those are better films. But Primer is a good movie to have watched. It accomplishes something that no other movie does.
That said, I have also watched Upstream Color. I don’t recommend it. It doesn’t have the skilled writing that Primer had and the binding life cycle idea thing just doesn’t prove to be that interesting - particularly not extended out as long as it is.
Don’t listen too much to the fanboys “explaining” (except the ones on this board, obviously 
). I’ve read a lot of that stuff around the internet, and much of it is just nonsense. Or at least written to obfuscate rather than clear things up. The giant chart with the multiple timelines that is floating around doesn’t actually make sense, as far as I can tell. If you want to understand the already confusing plot of Primer, immersing yourself in misguided fanwankery is probably counterproductive. At least it was in my case.
Mostly, you should be OK as long as you get the basics of how the time machine works, which this does a good job of explaining.
It’s actually not *that *complicated. Or, well, it is complicated. And there is a certain point where the story gets so convoluted that only God knows what’s going on. Or maybe not even God. But up to that point, the movie is possible to follow, as long as you watch it a few times. Or at least the parts in the beginning are possible to follow. Well, depending on your definition of “beginning”. Actually, maybe I should just shut up.
(As an alternative, you could make use of the section on Primer in this xkcd comic, which should hopefully help clear everything up. )
I’ve watched it so many times that I’ve lost count. Actually, I think I’ll go do it again now. The fact that multiple viewings is compulsory isn’t something I mind at all, rather the opposite. Since I love the movie, it’s just added value.
And, as I apparently mentioned upthread before this thread went through a time loop to our present day: If you can, also watch it with Shane Carruth’s commentary track, which is pretty interesting in its own right.
Primer isn’t perfect, but it is, almost certainly, the most well thought-out and most hardcore time travel movie out there. The plot is very, very smart. And I’m really happy that there is one movie like that in the world, because time travel plots tends to be either dumb as hell or plot hole city.
I thought “Star City” because in the airport he mentioned perhaps going to Star City, so it made sense to me that he ended up there, and without money he’d need work so he ironically ended up in this lowly position; but you’re probably right. Although if he was broke and on the run, how did he get money together to start a large engineering project? It seems unlikely that he could convince investors that such a seemingly harebrained idea is possible.
I think you’re confusing bad writing with cleverness. For a writer to “beat me” while also succeeding in his story telling, I think he needs to lead me down a wrong path successfully, before revealing what’s really going on (with the reveal being clear and obvious). I think that is what was being attempted here, and I think it failed.