Hey folks, Harry here... personally, I'm setting the ol' VCR to record a debate between a hick sneaky orangutan I'll call Clyde and Herman Munster tonight, cuz I'm off to see the AICN screening of PRIMER tonight with the wunderman responsible, Shane Carruth, director, writer and star of the little film that is kicking people's asses. Here's our own Copernicus, who saw the film at Toronto to chime in with his take on it!
PRIMER
Oh man, am I ever homesick for Austin. Even though I saw PRIMER at the Toronto Film Festival this year I want to fly back down to Austin just to see it again. I almost went to see it twice at the festival - the only reason I didn't is that I didn't want to rob someone else of the opportunity to see this movie by taking the seat.
PRIMER isn't the best movie I saw at the festival - that is a tall order given that it was made for a few thousand dollars. But it is the one that I've thought the most about. It is certainly in the top 5 movies I've seen this year, festival included, and that is a phenomenal achievement given that it was made for no money by a first time director (Shane Carruth) with an unknown cast.
Even though some other reviews have given away some of the plot twists, I want to keep this spoiler-free. Unfortunately that means I can't tell you most of the reasons the movie is so mind-blowing, but I can give you a vague idea of the setup. Four guys are scraping together a living with minor inventions created in their garage. During their tinkering, one of their machines starts to exhibit some unusual properties that seem to violate the laws of physics. The implications soon become profound and they find themselves in deep trouble, up against mysterious forces they don't understand.
It really is great to go into the movie knowing as little as possible (don't even read the talkbacks), because part of the charm of the movie is in the way it doles out clues at a deliberate pace and lets your mind slowly unwrap a treat. Like ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN it keeps you addicted to finding the next puzzle-resolving nugget. Buried in the jargon, in the dialogue carefully constructed lull you with the humdrum of the everyday, is lurking a series of revelations. They aren't announced cinema-style with great fanfare - but as you connect the dots the fog slowly lifts to reveal the sublimely intricate scaffolding of the plot.
In fact, the plot of PRIMER is so deeply layered, it is almost impossible to fully comprehend the first time you see it. Writer/director Carruth never takes a breath to explain the events unfolding - in fact he goes the other direction, forcing you to gather the details from the events you see, from the conversations you overhear coming in halfway through. Yet each sentence, each little prop, is carefully placed so that by the time the credits roll and all the reveals are complete you want to see it again not only to fully understand the movie but to appreciate its tightly crafted structure.
It isn't giving away too much to say that this movie is to science fiction what UNBREAKABLE was to the superhero genre. It takes a fantastic element that we've seen done to death in geek literature, but drops it into the real world -- our world. Like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, the almost-documentary style, when combined with a staggering amount of verisimilitude puts you into another realm of experience. You have to keep reminding yourself this is a movie, but some more primal part of your brain thinks it is all real. This just stokes the fires of the imagination and forces you to consider the consequences of living in a universe in which one of the all-time geek fantasies has come true.
Not since the dynamic duo of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick have we seen someone tip the scales of "science fiction" so far towards science. As a scientist, I was blown away with the way PRIMER nails the true (and almost never accurately portrayed) reality of scientific discovery. In real life, as in the film, there are mysterious and wonderful secrets wrapped up for us to discover in the unexplored facets of the universe. But these revelations don't come as bolts from the blue - they are slowly uncovered by hard, repetitive, and often mundane work. Further adding to the geek cred, the technobable here has the obfuscation-inducing ring of actual truth rather than the sound of something invented by a writer to advance the plot.
In the end the writer and director of PRIMER, Shane Carruth, has proven to be as inventive as his characters are onscreen. Without the benefit of a big budget he has given us something innovative, thought-provoking, and truly worthy of repeat viewing. I can't wait for the DVD.
