Most movies these days can be more or less fully appreciated after a single viewing, maybe occasionally a second. You’re getting pretty lucky if you can watch a recent movie for a third time, and still get something new out of it. Memento benefits from a second viewing due to the fact that the “ending” completely changes the meaning of everything else in the movie. Watching it again is like watching a whole new movie, due to the new context. Details of double crosses are clearer, mysteries are less ambiguous a second time around. The same goes for Fight Club, the Sixth Sense (but maybe not M. Night Shyamalan’s other films) and, to a degree, Donnie Darko.
But in Primer we have a film that not only encourages repeated viewings, but seems to require them. Some feel that this is a drawback of the film, and I’d be hard pressed to fully disagree. However, it’s a rare event to have a movie that holds it secrets close to it’s chest. Is the plot incomprehensible because it’s dealing with a subject that is essentially incomprehensible? I don’t think this is the case. Time travel movies have been done to death, and even casual sci-fi fans are familiar with the tropes of the genre, the Grandfather paradox, alternate timelines, causality, etc. But here the tropes are avoided in favor of a wide-eyed and brain-bending mystery. There’s no attempt to explain the science behind the time travel, just a relatively clear outlining of what appear to be the “rules” in this particular film’s theory of time travel. The characters don’t understand fully what’s happening, and the audience has to work from their knowledge.
While other time travel films tend to end up as parables of abusing poorly understood technology, or the inherent dangers of progress, Primer is a more human morality tale. In the end, it’s not sheer technological hubris or blind idealism that doom the characters, but it’s a noir-like tendency towards distrust, greed, and human error that brings the house of cards down. When Abe and Aaron start involving themselves in elaborate double-crosses involving multiple revisions of the same events, everything spirals out of control in unpredictable (to us) yet inevitable ways.
The strength of Primer lies in it’s devotion to it’s core ideas, rather than spectacle or surface. A $7,000 budget for a film (as in celluloid, not digital) leaves no room for sets, special effects, or any other distracting glitz. If this film succeeds or fails, it’s entirely on grounds of substance, since there is no exterior concerns. This is how science fiction is supposed to work, by positing a consequential change to our familiar world, and examining it’s consequences (see Philip K. Dick’s attempt at defining science fiction as a literature of ideas, separate from space opera, for further discussion). Primer owes a heavy debt to Dick, and his onion-layered narratives. In fact, if A Scanner Darkly wasn’t already in someone else’s hands, I’d hope for Shane Carruth to get his hands on it. This would be the perfect style for Dick’s meditation on drugs, paranoia, and the fragility of identity, a modern suburban utopia tweaked ever so slightly into the realm of speculative fiction.
For all it’s strengths and ambition, Primer ultimately suffers from a lack of exposition. The audience is expected to go along for the ride, feeling the topsy-turvy loopbacks rather than understanding them. This works perfectly on the right type of audience (such as yours truly), an audience who is willing to put in the effort to piece together a working theory of what exactly just happened in repeat viewings and post-film discussions. But to evaluate the film on a strictly narrative level finds it sorely lacking in clarity. To most viewers, this is a serious drawback, not an invitation to engage the film on a basic level. Obviously, this is not exactly the fault of the film or the filmmaker, but I can’t help feeling that there could have been a little more effort put into the presentation of the essential storyline. Certain events are ambiguous and debatable, most notably one of the key turning points towards the middle of the film, when a third time traveler is discovered. While the characters don’t know how he came into the game, and this seems to excuse the lack of explanation from the film, it is also a disservice to the audience who is willing to try to piece the events together in some semblance of logical progression.
Altogether, Primer is a fascinating, difficult film that is made all the more impressive by the fact that a first-time filmmaker created it on a budget that wouldn’t pay for the catering bill of a Hollywood film. Highly recommended, with the caveat that frustration and confusion are in store if you’re not willing to put in some effort.
