Dave Snowdon

I stumbled on the DVD of this film while aimlessly browsing the racks of DVDs in a local DVD store and was intrigued by the blurb on the back of the box - perhaps because of what it does not say as much as what it does.

PRIMER is set in the industrial park/suburban tract-home fringes of an unamed contemporary city where two young engineers, Abe and Aaron, are members of a small group of men who work by day for a large corporation while conducting extracurricular experiments on their own time in a garage. While tweaking their current project, a device that reduces the apparant mass of an object placed within it by blocking gravitational pull, they accidentally discover that it has some highly unexpected capabilties - ones that could enable them to do and have seemingly anything they want. Taking advantage of this unique opportunity is the first challenge they face. Dealing with the consequences is the next.

So firstly this is movie about two geeks, secondly my curiosity cannot resist knowing what the unique device is and thirdly the price (only about £6) was right so the DVD ends up coming home with me.

Now, this is the first film that has inspired me to watch the director’s commentary in it’s entirety after watching the film itself so that’s some indication of how intriguing I found it and also that the plot was hard to follow in places and I was curious enough to want to investigate further.

I think this is the first time travel film I’ve seen where the scriptwriter has actually thought really hard about how it would work and how ordinary people might react given that capability. Thankfully the main characters do not suddenly transform into stereotypical Hollywood action heroes. Rather than committing the normal Hollywood error of explaining so much that a drugged 5 year-old [1] would find it too simple the story perhaps leaves out a little too much (or maybe I just drunk too much beer while watching). That’s not necessarily too bad - I got a lot of extra enjoyment trying to figure it out and searching the web for more information.

With a film like this there is a temptation to over-analyse as can be a seen a little in the film’s forum but looking at some of the fan produced timelines shows how much there is to the actual story of which only a fraction is actually present in the film.

While watching the film it’s obvious that it’s low budget but that does not detract too much from the experience. I certainly wouldn’t have thought that the budget was as low as $7000. It also happens to be Shane Carruth’s first film. While I think he got carried away with some of the camera work and it’s obvious he was learning as he went I’d love to see what he could do with a "real" budget.

Links

 Film website
 Timeline
 Wikipedia
 Amazon.com