This year's big winner at Sundance, "Primer" is a low-budget,high-concept time travel flick with a plot so convoluted it makesthe reverse narrative of "Memento" seem straightforward bycomparison.
Abe (David Sullivan) and Aaron (Shane Carruth) are workadayengineers who cobble together science projects during theiroff-hours. With their crumpled dress shirts and starched ties, thetwo are chasing after the same start-up millions that have beensending tech-savvy entrepreneurs to their parents' basements sinceBill Gates first emerged from his.
What Abe and Aaron end up inventing, though, is somethingslightly more revolutionary than the personal computer.
At first, the contraption - a sort of a refrigerator cumsuperconductor slightly bigger than a toaster-oven - is onlymoderately perplexing; it runs without batteries for a coupleminutes and causes fungus to grow at an alarming rate. Then Abeputs his watch into it and things really start to get weird.
Realizing what they have on their hands, Abe and Aaron decide tobuild human-sized versions of the box in an out-of-the-way storagelocker. The two snap on oxygen masks, take some Dramamine and entertheir makeshift time machines, only to wake up six hours earlier onthe same day.
If that seems confusing, it gets worse. By the time you begin towrap your head around just what's happening on screen, "Primer" isalready two or three steps ahead, or behind, depending on whattimeline you're following.
"Are you hungry?" Aaron quips at one point. "I haven't eatensince later this afternoon."
Abe and Aaron inevitably fudge the space-time continuum, perhapsirrevocably, in the usual way (stock market, delusions ofomnipotence). Every attempt to go back and fix things only opensPandora's box a little wider. Soon scenes are repeating andpermutating, while sinister doppelgangers seem to be lurking inevery corner. By the last half hour, the only clue as to who'sreally who (and when) is facial hair.
In the end, "Primer," like most time travel movies, is morecautionary tale than adventure story: a metaphysical riddle wrappedup in the enigma of scientific hubris.
On another level entirely, it's a gloss on making movies on thecheap. There's symmetry between the time machine in "Primer,"assembled from whatever spare parts happen to be lying around, andthe film itself, with its overexposed 16mm film, friends and familydoubling as cast, and found locations in place of actual sets.
A former engineer himself, Shane Carruth, who wrote, directed,edited and composed the score for "Primer," made the film on ano-string budget of $7,000, which means that the biggest specialeffect is a flashlight.
The homemade, but by no means amateur feel of "Primer" ends upgiving the heady premise a striking foothold in the everyday. Abeand Aaron go to cocktail parties to raise funds for their petprojects, bitch about the monotony of work and kiss their kidsgoodnight when they're not tearing apart the very fabric of theuniverse.
Carruth's time machine also seems terrifyingly plausible foranyone whose view of reality is more informed by pop culture thanquantum physics. Filled with esoteric techno-babble and obliqueengineer-speak, "Primer" never deigns to explain its science to thelayman - a gambit that ends up paying off by keeping nearlyeveryone happily in the dark, and appeasing the few who areactually familiar with Feynman diagrams and the Meissnereffect.
More in step with Borges than "Back to the Future," "Primer"will leave you feeling confused and dumb, but, more importantly,aching to figure it all out. Even if you survive the hairpin plottwists the first time around, it'll take at least another twoviewings to unlock the film's more obscure mysteries.
No doubt a movie that refuses to give up its secrets quite soeasily will turn off a lot of viewers, but "Primer" is designedmore for the obsessive cult fan than the casual moviegoer. It's afilm that demands to be lived in and engaged with long after its78-minute running time.
