There are some movies that are traditionally characterized as “mindblowing.” They contain a revelation that catch the viewer completely by surprise and cause the audience to think in a wholly new way about the themes of the movie. Some popular examples of this type of movie are Fight Club, The Matrix, and Memento. Well, the thoroughly independent film Primer blows all of these out of the water. Not one can hold a candle to the majestic, breathtaking, fantastic impossibility that is this movie.
It begins with Aaron (Shane Carruth, director and producer), Abe (David Sullivan), Robert (Casey Goodsen), and Phillip (Anand Upadhyaya) as engineers running a side business in Aaron’s garage. Work begins on an invention of Abe’s, a room temperature superconducting device, and Robert and Phillip are quickly excluded as the implications of the device become staggering: time travel.
By placing an object in the box they built, Abe and Aaron can allow it to experience time at a far faster rate than normal. When they carefully adjust the timing of turning it on and then off, an object can go in at one time and return when the machine was turned on, thus traveling backwards in time.
Don’t try to understand it, especially not before seeing the movie. Aaron and Abe begin using this to make money by purchasing stock they know will rise, but soon their plans become far more ambitious, and the storyline becomes far more confusing, with time-split doubles and failsafe boxes and boxes inside boxes, among many other ideas.
What makes this movie so powerful, like all other gripping movies, is how strongly the audience can identify with their characters. Several factors contribute to this, primarily the dialogue. According to the official movie web site, http://www.primermovie.com/, Carruth immersed himself in the everyday language of physics. Every piece of dialogue is real conversation, the way two people would talk to one another. The characters themselves are middle-class American engineers, with no special background. The settings (a garage, a hotel room, a library, the side of a highway) are ordinary places. Finally, Carruth shot the movie on ordinary 16mm film, and nothing about the movie was digitally created. The entire budget, according to the website, was about $7,000.
The end result is a lot of very commonplace elements that combine to make something out of this world. As Aaron’s narration says during the movie, “They took from their environment what was needed and made something more.” That is what Carruth did with this movie. Visually, the movie has been described as retro, having a look reminiscent of 1970s films, which further contributes to the sensation that everything about the story is completely ordinary. There is no chrome, no neon or flashing lights, and no spectacular displays of any kind. Just two engineers with a big problem to solve.
Primer returns science fiction to its roots—normal people dealing with a colossal what if—and its consequences. In the aftermath of their discovery, Aaron and Abe show very different sides of themselves as their invention threatens to spiral completely out of control. Primer is a new science fiction classic that probes deep into themes like friendship, loyalty, betrayal, innovation, and of course, temporal paradoxes.
