film

Primer (2004)

A down to earth yet completely unnerving take on time-travel that anyone who’s ever thought about questions such as “the grandfather paradox” ought to see.

This story starts like a lot of others, with me drifting around Netflix trying to find something worth my interest.  This time my travels brought me to a low budget indie flick called Primer, with a description about time travel.  I’m always down for a good (well, “good” may be a stretch…maybe “thoughtful” is a better word…?) time travel movie; even the bad ones tend to raise interesting points.  Primer is pretty darn unique in this regard.  It presents time travel in a very innocuous light, and although it ultimately drowns in the trappings of its own subdued approach, it gets off to a hell of start.

The fellow who wrote and acted in this flick had a background in mathematics and wanted to take a different approach to the invention of the time machine.  He points out that many of our greatest advancements were discovered by accident or incident, usually while in the process of tackling a completely different problem.  In the case of our young scientists in Primer, they’re looking for a way to reduce the weight of an object when they suddenly discover that time inside “the box” is passing very differently than time outside of the box (i.e. “the real world”).

Unless you’re an engineer or physicist or some other kind of genius, the technical jargon will be difficult to surmount.  There are a lot of conversations that will go over pretty much anyone’s head, and though it doesn’t really get in the way of the plot, it does muddy up the “how” of how the time machine works.  Once we get past the first act, things pick up speed and start getting really interesting.

The nondescript “time machine.”

One thing I liked was how discretely it was handled.  These guys didn’t jump in a booth and twist some dials and end up on the Queen Anne’s Revenge or on the Mongolian Steppes during the rule of the Khans.  No, these guys were playing with baby steps, going backwards in time a day in order to make money off the stock market.  That seems plausible, right?  What’s even cooler is that they really take a critical look at causality so as to not make any waves.  They carefully plan their movements so that they don’t bump into their doubles during the day that they relive, and that they don’t put themselves into contact with the outside world during the times that both they and their doubles are active at the same time.

Time travel may not be real, but the filmmakers have done a wonderful job of crafting conscientious characters in a world where it is real.  These guys are careful and methodical, but also adventurous.  Even the best time travel movies out there usually end up forcing themselves into a “closed loop,” which ultimately determines everything that will ever happen.  It’s one of the few logical ways to discuss the concept.  Closed loops lead to their own issues, but they’re relatively clean compared to some of the alternatives.  Primer does not fall back on this concept due to the characters’ consideration for altering as little as possible.  And by doing so, they create an unnerving, almost eerie vibe as their adventures begin to pile up, little blips like answering the cell phone pop up, and they begin to question whether or not they exist in the reality that was intended.

(Don’t know what a closed loop is?  Imagine a scenario where I take my volume of Shakespeare’s complete works and travel back to a time period just before any of Shakespeare’s work has been written.  I go and find ol’ Willie and hand him my volume of complete works.  He says “thank you!” and goes on to pen these sonnets and plays, which are then collected a few hundred years later and bound into the book that I then buy to take back to Willie.  What happens is we have an endless loop where “Shakespeare’s work” never has a point of origin.  The book I have exists, but it only exists because he wrote the plays, but he only wrote them because I carried the book back in time to him – no one really wrote all that stuff in a closed loop scenario.  A closed loop works under the assumption that the past cannot be changed, therefore if I go back in time to 1822, I was always there.)

Here’s how Primer gets around the idea of a “closed loop;” it assumes that the past can actually be altered.

Unfortunately, the film quickly loses me as it spirals into the third act.  At this point there are doubles of doubles running around with all sorts of ulterior motives.  The revelation of Abe’s failsafe box and the intervention of the girlfriend’s father really threw a wrench in things.  But then events start moving at a break-neck pace.  The failsafe is rendered useless, Aaron begins drugging and stuffing his doubles into closets and attics before making a deal with one of them, and then things slow down just long enough for them to alter an event at a party “Groundhog’s Day-style” after endless study.  I don’t really understand what happens here or why it moves in such a strange direction.  I’m partially convinced something profound is happening that’s just going over my head.

The film wraps up with a firmly altered timeline.  Aaron moves on to make a fortune…or a bigger machine…while Abe stays behind to sabotage his former selves’ attempts at successful time traveling, hoping that some eventual past version of himself and Aaron will give up and move on to something else.  It’s sort of bleak in its own way: here is a reality forever altered by these events.  Once the ripple effect is taken into account, who knows what might be different?  My life?  Your life?  Did it lead to the birth of another Hitler?  Is our enter existence that transient?

It’s all a very spooky thought, and I’m sorry that the film doesn’t spend more time exploring these repercussions.  If not for the muddy climax, we might be looking at something really special  here, though I suppose it holds true that filmmakers still don’t really know what to do with their time travel plots.

Written by The Cubist