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A time travel story confronts the paradox: how can a traveler to the past avoid affecting the future in uncontrollable ways? "Primer" tackles the conundrum with compelling force, cerebral gymnastics and the python grip of inexorable logic.
The joke goes: What do they do with engineers who turn 40? They take them out and shoot them.
A quartet of engineers who work for a Dallas semiconductor company have decided to pool their talents in their spare time to develop an original invention, a break-through process or a patentable idea that will have commercial applications and deliver them from the dreary tedium of their work-driven lives before the promise of their most productive years slips away and consigns them to permanent disappointment.
They are not geniuses. "Meticulous, yes. Methodical. Educated. Nothing extreme." On their best days, they might be considered "clever."
In their off duty hours they work in long-sleeved shirts and ties. They conduct experiments on the cheap in a garage with borrowed equipment. They buy electronic components from Walmart. They cannibalize a microwave oven, a car, a refrigerator. Brimming with notions, they speak in elliptical sentences and argue briskly in the language of physics and electrical engineering.
"They took from their surroundings what was needed and made of it something more."
Abe and Aaron are the first to see sparks fly from their flints. After months of fruitless tries, they produce a field in an enclosed box that creates more energy than it uses. "There was value in the thing." They knew that. What might be its practical application? "They were out of their depth." They realize that "the easiest way to get exploited was to sell something they did not yet understand." They decide to cut out their partners.
More weeks of hit and miss experiments reveal a stunning fact: their box drew its energy from a continuous feedback loop that could return its contents to the past. They had built a time machine.
The next step is inevitable: they must test their device on themselves. They build a pair of coffin-sized boxes to generate their field. Aaron asks, "What is your opinion on how safe this thing is?"
Abe shrugs, "I can imagine no way in which this thing could be considered remotely close to safe."
The device has its limits. It does not propel its occupants into the future. It can only return them to the moment at which it was activated. Abe and Aaron warm up the boxes for five days, enter them, and return to the past.
The practical application is obvious. The device grants them five days of prescience, enough certain knowledge of outcomes to reap fortunes from jackpot lottery numbers, sports wagers, and spectacularly performing market securities.
There are also complications. The past is exactly as they have left it and it includes them as they were before they traveled backward in time. They have become their own doubles.
They are alert to the peril of discovery by their doubles or by anybody who might detect them in two places at once, wives, relatives, friends, or their partners unaware of their invention. "If we're playing with causality..." Abe worries. They take themselves "out of the equation" by sequester in an out-of-town motel, disconnecting phones, television, radio - anything that might keep them connected electronically or emotionally to their personal world.
Leaving their doubles to continue replaying the crucial five days, Abe and Aaron repeat their trips back to the original moment of their machine's activation, returning each time with an accumulation of knowledge they can transform into exponential growth of bankable cash.
Their circuitous repetitions of time travel take a physical toll. Their ears bleed. Their hands lose the ability to fashion script. Their decision-making faculties lose focus. Aaron voices a fantasy of violent confrontation with an obnoxious superior, "just to know what it feels like", then explains that he would subsequently prevent himself from the act by intervening before it occurred. Abe reminds him that contact with their doubles must never happen. The consequences would be inconceivable. But "The idea had been spoken. The words wouldn't go back after they had been uttered aloud."
"I'm not going to pretend I know about paradoxes." Aaron admits. "About the worst thing in the world is to know that the moment you're experiencing has already been plotted."
In a moment of shocking clarity, as Aaron and Abe observe their doubles from afar, they realize that they have no way of knowing whether either of them, without the knowledge of the other, has already altered their past. Mistrust has introduced a variable into their equation. The permutations are terrifying.
"What's worse," Aaron wonders, "thinking you're being paranoid or knowing that you should be?"
Writer/director Shane Carruth, who also edited and stars in the film and composed its music and sound effects, is a one-man band, who produced "Primer" on an onion-skin budget, stocked the cast and crew with friends and family, and delivered a taut, intricate, visually arresting, intellectually stimulating gem. Crafting film virtue from raw necessity and quicksilver imagination, Carruth employs low-key realism in cost-conscious characters, tech-heavy dialog, taped-together props, and naturalistic lighting. With quickening pace, the narrative contours move from the familiar to the fantastic. It is a convincing fable of garage science yielding profound innovation with infinite implications.
"They took from their surroundings what was needed and made of it something more." "Primer" is an alchemical miracle: base materials transmuted into cinematic gold.
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2025
- Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2021
Top reviews from other countries
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Amazon CustomerReviewed in Spain on September 22, 2019
Interesante para quienes les gustan los planteamientos dificiles sobre viajes en el tiempo.
- N@qOyQ@tSiReviewed in Australia on December 22, 2021
Excellent and thought provoking masterpieces
