There’s another sort of time travel movie currently on Netflix that was also self financed on a limited budget that I found entertaining and at least comprehensible.
And it actually has a similar twist.Time Lapse
I forgot I had watched that one last weekend too. It was okay, but it reminded me too much of this.
No, it’s not a twist film.
If it compares to anything, I’d actually call it a heist film. So it’s like watching Oceans 11, but instead of pulling off a heist that’s clever and intricate to a level that I can follow and understand, it’s a heist which is so clever and intricate that I have been stumped. I don’t know how they did it, but I accept that they did.
I’d compare Primer to the magic acts on Fool Us by Shawn Farquhar and Kostya Kimlat. I have a reasonable ideas about how they may have accomplished much of what they did, but in the end, it’s just magic.
I think that is missing the point completely. What you’re describing is a “whodunnit”. The plot of *Primer *is about something else entirely. Yes, the movie is certainly clever, and there are elements of misdirection and reveal. But “clear and obvious” isn’t the point all. At the end of a “whodunnit”, all is explained, and the world is put back in order. At the end of Primer, the story doesn’t end so much as simply stop, because no one (not the writer, not the audience, maybe not even the universe) would be able to follow along any further. Rather than the world being put back in order, the order is about to totally break apart.
Maybe the story is a cautionary tale about what happens when you try to control your life too much. Abe and Aaron try to use the time machine to order events and arrange the world to their advantage, and instead everything spins out of control so comprehensively that “clusterfuck” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
We all wish we had a time machine so we could go back and set things right: Our careers, our relationships, our choices in life. Well, be careful what you wish for, I guess.
No, I’m not describing a “whodunnit”. I’m describing something like “The Sixth Sense” or “Fight Club” .
I’m with these guys. The wife and I both loved the film, although it’s been awhile since we’ve seen it. And this is a good example of why I miss Roger Ebert. We had about the same taste, and he raved about this movie. Over here, it’s not easy keeping up with the little indie gems, or obtaining them even if you do. (No, I still don’t have a computer that can download movies.) Ebert turned me on to a lot of great little films like this one.
Yeah, well, the same thing goes. Primer isn’t “The Sixth Sense” or “Fight Club”, and isn’t trying to be.
Or, rather, Primer doesn’t exactly leave you with a feeling of: “Aha, now I understand what happened.” But I certainly don’t think it tries to, either. It’s more: “Holy shit, this thing is out of control.” If you’re feeling uneasy, imagine how the characters feel, with different versions of themselves running around, off the grid and with their own agendas. That has to be a bit panic-inducing. The plot leaving you with a sense of “WTF” seems more appropriate than everything being wrapped up in a way that is clear and obvious. For Abe and Aaron, I don’t think things look clear or obvious at all.
Having to go back and watch it several times isn’t a bug, either, it’s a feature. Reliving the same story over and over, and trying to have it make more sense, is exactly what the characters are doing. So, again, the viewer’s experience of that mirrors what the characters do, and how they feel. That repetition and re-framing is built into the plot and the dialogue.
No. It for sure isn’t. Those at least made sense.
Primer does make sense. It makes sense on a story level, and it makes sense on a plot level, much more so than your usual time travel fare. Of course, time travel isn’t possible in our universe, so something has to give. In the case of Primer, it’s arguably the laws of thermodynamics. But given that, it makes sense.
Is it too clever for its own good? Maybe. That’s debatable. I don’t think so, although I can see how someone might. It certainly believes in treating the viewers as geniuses, rather than idiots.
And liking it, is, of course, optional. But you can’t say that it’s not smart.
Part of the problem is that things not making sense is itself a large part of the point of the movie. I happen to love that aspect of it. The characters start out feeling in control, and gradually get more and more confused and freaked out by what’s going on - maybe because they are accumulating brain damage from time travel, or maybe because there are other versions of themselves working against them, or maybe they aren’t the only time travellers. Their sense of disorientation spreads to us, the viewers, in a particularly effective way (IMHO).
I recall an interview with Carruth in which he was asked why the other time-traveller showed up in the latter part of the movie. He said he didn’t know how or why. Now maybe that’s just some writery bullshit, and he had a possible future plotted out in which the two guys showed this dude the time machine in order to get something out of him… or maybe Carruth was really ballsy enough to put some inexplicable shit into a movie all about how existentially threatening this type of time travel would be.
I saw the movie years ago and I don’t remember the details of the plot point at all, so my explanation will be vague and possibly wrong. But what I recall about that scene was that there were multiple instances/copies of people with various agendas running around doing things that had not yet been subjectively experienced by the people we’re following in the narrative because they hadn’t yet done them. I think we were to infer that someone, at some subjective future point (subjective from the instance of the person the movie camera is following) involved that guy in their plot somehow, and he gained access to the machine with his own agenda. They saw the effect before they saw the cause or the agenda that lead to it. So to them, they’re seeing completely inexplicable actions.
This is actually one of the key plot points. Real time travel wouldn’t be experienced in the narrative form that we’re used to. We (some sort of objective observer) wouldn’t follow the person travelling through time, accomplishing very actions, and then going back and seeing the changed actions happen differently. Rather, time would move in a line, and we would experience those changed actions in their final form as the first/original action that took place.
This is something that people have a very difficult time understanding/accepting, and that’s why almost every time travel movie is wrong - people only understand the story when told in a subjective narrative form by following a subject that effectively exists outside the timelines by being the one travelling through them/causing the changes. That sort of storytelling is what leads to totally nonsensical stuff like in Looper when one guy attempts to stop another (in the subjective/narrative present) by chopping off his limbs of his past self, leading to them spontaneously disappearing in the subjective present. Realistically, if he took the action of cutting the guy up at an earlier point, it would mean that the guy had always been missing the limbs since they were cut off, so he’d have lived his whole life that way - they wouldn’t suddenly disappear later in his life just because that’s the subjective narrative we’re viewing when that aspect of the story happens, it makes no sense) or Back To The Future when people fade away from pictures.
But in Primer, when you have people making several runs back to the same time period, where different instances from various time periods of their selves are all running around doing different things, some of which will be unknown to the person the story is following because they (their current/subjective selves) haven’t yet actually come back to do them, then you completely lose the traditional narrative understanding of cause and effect. Things would happen, and if you could follow their thread you would understand, but as someone experiencing that timeline in real time, you cannot follow the thread. It just appears as an inexplicable action.
So, at some point, they involved angry bearded guy in their scheme. He became able to travel and had his own agenda. He went back to a time before some version of them involved him in their time travelling. We don’t know how this sequence of events happens, we’re just seeing the results, and so they make no sense to us. This is essentially how time travel would actually work. We would see the results of actions before seeing their cause. It completely destroys the linear narrative of how we interact with the world. Seeing things that make no sense is actually one of the most grounded, realistic aspects of the movie.
I probably didn’t explain that well. It’s a difficult concept to explain, and a difficult one to grasp. Time travel wouldn’t work in the way that’s compatible with the way we understand the world, causality, and time. We would have a very difficult time grasping the consequences of real time travel. That’s what makes this movie so challenging.
Terrific to see this thread resurrected; it’s still one of my top 10 favorite movies.
SenorBeef, I think you did an excellent job explaining how Primer presents time travel, why it’s presented that way and that it is a more accurate depiction of what time travel would be like if it ever happened.
The bearded man, btw, is Thomas Granger, Rachels father, who they have spoken of as someone who has money and might be willing to give them some as an investment in their invention. To me, it’s clear that at some point they gave him a demonstration trip and now he may have his own ideas for the device. I agree that the reason he is a surprise to Abe and Aaron is because they have not yet subjectively experienced those events, so they have no way of knowing what he is up to or why.
Also, the ending: the “tour guide” is clearly an engineer/translator who is instructing the team that will build the new, massive device for Aaron.
nm. my mistake.
Loved Primer when I saw it a few years ago. Enough that seeing this thread is motivating me to put it on my Netflix queue.
I also thought of the movie Time Lapse, which I liked a lot. Another low-budget time-travel gem that fans of Primer might like, which I see was already mentioned on the previous page. I really liked Time Lapse, but I wouldn’t put it on Primer level.
A movie I would put on Primer level is Coherence. It’s not about time travel at all, but it’s sort of similar. And similar amounts of thought went into the plotting, I think. At least as much as you can without there being time travel.
Primer is the gold standard. Time Lapse and Coherence are worthy additions to the genre.
To further explain my point, imagine a very simple time device. It’s a little plastic chute, vertically mounted. You can drop a post card into it at any point, and the post card will arrive at the moment the machine was constructed. So you can send messages to the past.
If we were watching a typical time travel movie, we’d see the people construct the machine, and then we’d see them watch tomorrow’s lottery numbers, drop them on a post card into the chute, and then the movie would go back to the first day it was invented, and now as soon as they turned it on, a post card with tomorrow’s lottery numbers comes out. They play them, win, and something horrible goes wrong. So now we see them write on a post card that says “message 2. do NOT play those lottery numbers. Also, save Timmy from the well” Then we go back to the day it was created, and the machine gets powered up, and now we see those two postcards come out. And now we watch what they do with those, and create a third postcard warning him not to drop his cell phone down the well when he’s saving Timmy.
Except what would actually happen if you built such a machine is that the moment you turned it on, you would suddenly be flooded with countless postcards. It would just explode with them. All the notes from the future would hit you all at once. All of the times you did something and tried to get yourself to do otherwise. All of the things you wanted to do in the first place. The time someone else discovers your machine and sends their own messages, etc. It would all happen at once.
That’s a much more simple example than in Primer, because in Primer, agents actually travel to the past and affect it. They have their own agenda and their own actions. They’re existing at the same time as you and causing things to change and even going back in time again during the same period to do even more things.
But I was just saying that to demonstrate that essentially, once time travel becomes possible, all the effects from it will suddenly happen what will appear to observers to be the first time through, even before the people subjectively experience/effect the causes.
*Coherence *is certainly no Primer, IMO, but I did find it somewhat interesting. Despite all the nonsense with the comet and Schrödinger’s cat.
Although I found the two versions of Chandler Bing extremely confusing.
Too late for edit:
Also, I still don’t understand what Ulrike Meinhof was doing there. Strange parallel universes, indeed. 
That was intentionally put in there as nonsense. The characters are desperate for an explanation as to what’s going on, so they grab onto anything and pretend it’s relevant. That whole scene is a send-up of times in movies where we get an expositional info-dump on what exactly is happening. Nothing in that scene has anything to do with what’s happening in the movie.
The comet does, and that’s just silliness, of course, but it’s the central conceit. It’s the one thing for this movie, like how in Dawn of the Dead the one thing is “okay, so there are zombies.” Or in Primer the one thing is that time travel is possible. Every movie is allowed one thing, but then if you use it, everything else has to make sense and be logically consistent. Coherence succeeds on this score.
Inside the story, the Schrödinger’s cat scene isn’t just a mockery of expositional info-dumps, it’s also actively detrimental to the characters because it has nothing to do with anything, and the arbitrary meaning they attach to it is actually self-destructive.
I have spoiled your post.