"Primer" Grade: B PG-13, 78 m with Shane Carruth and David Sullivan. Written and directed by Shane Carruth. Opens Friday.
By NEAL FERSKO Eagle Staff Writer
It's hard to imagine people walking out of the movie "Primer" with a clear picture of what they just witnessed. Here is a film in a hurry to get its message across in a believable manner by grounding its science fiction in the sensibilities of the world. It tries to do this so much that it doesn't have time to slow down and tell the audience where they've been and where they might be going.
This is sci-fi without plot exposition, a Discovery Channel special gone horribly wrong. In the end viewers have to piece together what they understood and take away their own conclusions.
Shane Carruth and David Sullivan play Aaron and Abe, two engineers in their early 30s who work menial jobs to pay the bills in addition to toiling as part-time inventors with two other low level workers. In opening scenes we see all the mind-numbing detail of their endeavors. There is heavy use of technical jargon and realistic dialogue for the first half hour by both that helps display authenticity pretty effectively.
Gradually, both Aaron and Abe come to realize the full implications of a side effect for their latest invention, the most realistic form of time travel probably ever committed to fiction. This is one of the rare instances in film where you'll find intellectual progression so meticulously evoked in dialogue and cinematography. All of this sets up the second act of the film where both Aaron and Abe cut themselves off from the world around them to fully explore their experiment for potential profit.
Using complex narration and dizzying jump cuts viewers find out the strenuous detail both characters must go through in order to exploit their time travel device while not disrupting the world around them. However, it becomes clear that the experiments are getting out of hand very quickly. With only vague dual narrations by the lead characters and an unknown voice depicting the entire movie in flashback as a guide, it's hard to make sense of the extent of the damage they are causing. Because of this confusion the audience is able to empathize with Abe and Aaron more easily. Like everyone, they weren't prepared to stumble on something so cosmically intricate.
It's a credit to both actors that they manage to serve the plot so well by letting the most dramatic moments overcome them rather than trying to tame the movie into submission.
The pace of "Primer" is one of urgency, successfully ditching overt drama that independent and Hollywood cinema often employ. This is a film where fiction invades a world of precise science rather than the other way around. This is an intriguing concept that is hard to pull off well. Every time something extraordinary does occur, the audience becomes as disoriented as the lead characters through quick cutaways and jarring music.
Perhaps the most prominent flaw in "Primer" is that it succumbs to its own ambitions of POV narrative, trying to elicit emotions through sheer amounts of plots twists rather than a few effective ones. The use of intentionally confusing plot points wears thin after awhile, preventing "Primer" from being a truly great film. The exceptional cinematography, scoring and editing do manage to tie together the incoherencies pretty well, but only to a certain extent.
Shot on gritty 16 mm film with a scant budget of $7,000 by Writer/Director/Composer/Editor/Star Shane Carruth, "Primer" took the indie scene by storm this year. Coming out of nowhere, it won the coveted Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the Sundance Film Festival and a national distribution deal with Thinkfilm.
In the end "Primer" is probably one of the few examples of truly egalitarian science fiction. It doesn't really have a moral outside the scope of the ordinary for any movies with mad scientists. Instead, it proposes a scenario where the scientists are the guys who live down the block who have little ambition beyond hopes for a better life, a disquieting thought which "Primer" explores well.
