< < back
(this review was originally written February 18, 2021)
Primer is a puzzle taking the form of cinema. Shane Carruth, on a $7,000 budget, created a cult classic that has had nerds making flowcharts for over a decade, trying to understand the intricacies of the plot and the convoluted paths its characters take through it. Using a minimalist style with a time-travel system that is about as "hard" as science fiction can get, Carruth weaves together an entirely logical yet fiendishly complicated story, inviting the viewer to unpack it using their own wits and (presumably) multiple rewatches. It sounded like the perfect movie for me.
I did not like it one bit.
It's interesting, at least in theory, and you can tell Carruth has plenty of ideas. This movie does some things I've never seen done by anyone else, at least not to the same extent. The problem is, bluntly, most of his ideas are bad. And, in attempting to see them through, he sacrifices the opportunity to build a properly entertaining movie. There are a lot of little things that stop the puzzle from clicking the way a good puzzle is supposed to, and the plot isn't strong enough to hold up on its own. If I weren't literally the exact target audience for this movie, I'd be willing to give it some of the benefit of the doubt, like maybe I just wasn't the right kind of person to "get it". But I am no stranger to puzzle-stories (homestuck homestuck homestuck), and I just don't think Primer is a very good example of its genre.
Problem #1: Pacing. Primer is a short movie - only a bit over an hour - and the actual time travel doesn't come in until about a third of the way through. The vast majority of the technical complexity is shoved into the last 15 minutes, with the preceding time setting up the basics of the characters and time-travel mechanics. It's pretty normal for hard sci-fi to spend a lot of time establishing how exactly the mechanics of the thing work, but with such a brief runtime Primer does not give its plot twists room to breathe. I felt like I had a pretty strong handle on what was going on for the first 75% of the runtime, until a point hit when it was like I'd accidentally skipped ahead three scenes and missed a crucial moment; for the last quarter, I was utterly lost. Still, the beginning might be fun, learning about the world and characters, right? Well...
Problem #2: Context. As a story, Primer is decidedly mediocre. The characters are bland, and - time travel aside - the things they do are blander. Abe and Aaron, the two leads, are two dry engineers who work on dry engineering projects, and, once they stumble across time travel, they use it very drily. Neither of them have much personality, and their dialogue has no chemistry to it, no weight. Even if they ultimately aren't the point, the characters need to be engaging, they need to have dramas and drives and irreconcilable desires (and typing quirks), to get the audience invested before they get hit with the wonky timeline shit. Even if the puzzle itself were good, I just don't CARE about these people enough to put the effort into solving it. But maybe I'm focusing on the wrong thing; the puzzle is what matters.
Problem #3: Setup. This puzzle is very, very poorly explained. Some suggest that this movie is bold and clever for leaving crucial scenes unshown, merely implied by characters, leaving viewers to piece together the actual events on their own. This is wrong on two counts. First, that's fucking stupid. Second, the scenes aren't really 'implied' at all; they are TOLD very clearly, just never SHOWN. There's no ambiguity or puzzle-solving involved, it's just the same information presented in a much more obtuse and less engaging way. For instance, we never see Aaron's girlfriend's birthday party, but it's described in detail and I know exactly what happens in it - the only difference is that it took much longer to get the information across and was less fun. I appreciate Carruth's drive to experiment, but some experiments just don't work. Still, a brilliant solution can be worth grappling with obtuse explanations.
Problem #4: Solution. So full disclosure: at this point I just watched a video on YouTube telling me what was actually going on, and I'm trusting it to have not made shit up. However, if this video is accurate, the big hidden mystery at the center of the tangled mess of timelines is... that actually one of the characters went back in time to stop it all from happening in the first place, aka Standard Time Travel Plot #6. There's nothing actually that exciting at the bottom of the time-travel story, even once you've pieced it all together; the mechanics are laboriously defined, but nothing interesting is ever DONE with them. Time travel is a well-worn topic in science fiction, so you need to be pretty creative to make a genuinely original story out of it - just think how much spicier it'd be as some kind of multimedia text-comic-animation-game fusion thing! Primer is smart, but I don't think it's creative.
So with all that taken into account, what's left? A needlessly obtuse puzzle, masking an uninteresting solution, as explored through a bland story about dullards. I don't want to be too down on it, because I know it's very well-liked by Cool People, but I just cannot see what there is to like here. It's not a good movie or a good puzzle; I don't hate it, but I'm left with nothing worth giving a second thought. If you're considering watching this movie, might I recommend trying webcomics instead? There's this one cool one which has a way better time travel plot, but I just can't seem to remember its name.
2/10