Primer

Once every few years I see a movie that completely knocks me sideways and gets me in that "holy shit, what was that?" obsessive mode where I watch the thing time and time again, as if I were dissecting it layer by layer in an attempt to understand it. Primer was such a movie.

I'm not going to give out many details of this movie to you since most of what made it work on me was the element of surprise. To my consternation, the packaging for the DVD gives a bit of the surprise away, but then again, with this movie it's not so much the plot as the execution of it that either drives you up the wall or sucks you in right from the get-go.

Primer was recommended to me over a year ago by a longime 'net friend, and I'd picked it up through work a few months back and let it sit on the shelf for a while with the other dozens of unviewed DVDs I intend to watch sometime or another. The other night, Sarah was looking for something for us to watch at a relatively late hour, and I decided to throw Primer into the DVD player, figuring its concise running time (73 minutes) wouldn't keep us up until past 5 A.M. (unlike, say, King Kong).

As it turned out, I was wrong: we were up a couple hours after Primer ended, looking for information and insight into the movie we had just seen and maybe partially understood...we think.

Rather than deal out typical Hollywood-style introduction to the central characters and "ease" you into the story, Primer drops you right smack in the middle of a group of bright and driven would-be inventors (all of them looking for a profitable break to get them out of their dull-as-dishwater day jobs) and dares you to keep up with them. At first, this seems like this is a film that goes out of its way to confuse the living shit out of you, though for me that feeling of disorientation had me wanting to know what the hell was going on right from the first scene.

While there are a few breaks in the "action" that let you do some "catching up" of sorts, Primer is chock full of dense, Robert Altman-esque overlapping conversations thick with tech-speak and, in the case of finally getting to the central idea of the movie, painstakingly slow reveals. While I generally find the use of the "subtitling" function on DVD players to be an annoying distraction, I was very thankful to be able to re-watch Primer and pay close attention to the dialogue and draw out far more of what was happening than before.

OK, that's all I'll say about this movie for now. Go find it, rent it, and watch it and let me know what you think. Primer is definitely not for everyone, and even for indie-cinema fans it isn't easy to process, but I found it extremely rewarding in the end.

For those of you who watch Primer (or have seen it and would like some additional insight and illustrative help with the whole thing), I'll end this post with a couple of websites that shed some light on the events of the film:

Here we have an illustrative page (apparently created by a guy who has WAY more free time than I do and has seen the movie possibly dozens of times more than I) providing a series of timelines to put the film's events into better focus.

And here is the official film site, containing a forum (frequented by the lead actor/writer/director Shane Carruth himself at one point) discussing various plot points and interpretations of key scenes/dialogue.


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