Great movie -- "Primer"

[Vort]

I watched a great movie! You should watch it! I highly recommend it.

 

Primer was made in 2004 (or maybe 2009). It's a great, great film -- an indie film. You can tell it isn't Hollywood, because of what it doesn't do:

1. It doesn't assume its audience is a bunch of morons who come to sit mindlessly and be entertained by explosions.
2. It doesn't bother explaining its dialog or giving embarrassingly transparent expository speeches disguised as explanations for bystanders but obviously intended for the viewing audience, instead inviting the audience to be as confused as the characters themselves seem to be.
3. It doesn't pander to the audience by wrapping everything up with a nice bow on the package, but leaves the viewers to wonder, just as the characters themselves do, "What the heck was going on?"
4. It doesn't demand a fortune in production costs -- the movie itself supposedly cost $7,000 (that's SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS) to make. A movie with a thousand times that budget would be considered "shoestring". Seven thousand dollars is more like 'weekend camcorder project" material. Yet aside from the relatively low film quality (exacerbated by not-always-adequate lighting), that really never shows on screen.
5. It doesn't draw attention to itself, inviting the viewer to say, "Wow, what a clever trick the director just pulled." Instead, it simply tells the story.

And a great (if confusing) story it is. Four engineers are discussing their weekend-and-free-time garage project, which judging by the very dense dialog, apparently consists of something involving high-temperature superconductors and maybe reducing the mass (or maybe just the gravitational attraction) of matter. The two important guys find a totally unexpected and frankly miraculous side effect when one of them discovers five years' growth of a fungus in just five days (or hours, or minutes -- I forget) inside their machine. They come to the inescapable conclusion that they have not merely built a mass-altering machine, but some sort of time machine. Then they start wondering if it could hold, you know, living people...

 

Why was this such a great movie? Lots of reasons. For one thing, it shows two very intelligent individuals who are overwhelmed and find themselves completely out of their depth. Unlike Scotty or Giordi Leforge, they can't punch a few buttons, spout some pseudotech dialog, and solve the problem. For another thing, it shows an entirely realistic, believable, and ignoble response to finding the ability to travel through time: Make a killing in the stock market. And it shows that innocent stupidity coupled with a hugely complex system will always lead to disaster, the only question being just how disastrous things end up. (And lots of other reasons, too.)

 

Most time travel shows are one of two types: Played for laughs or played for drama. The former (e.g. Back to the Future, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, lots of others) can be great fun, and since they don't take themselves too seriously, neither need we. The latter type (e.g. Star Trek, Terminator) tend to be much less fun, though they can be successful (note Terminator). But since they take their own time travel idea seriously, so can (or must) we. And the time travel angle always breaks down on analysis. It's a little thing called "causality", something that pretty much all rational people believe in, but that must be discarded in most storylines to allow time travel to have larger effects. Star Trek is the most irritating of these types, since it posits that time travel simply makes a new copy of the time traveler, and/or perhaps of the entire universe. Vanishingly few sci-fi movies that invoke this idea actually pull it off successfully.

 

Primer handles this fatal flaw in its storyline mainly by obfuscation. This is not a criticism; it's actually an effective and entirely reasonable solution, since it's obvious that the characters themselves don't really understand what's going on. Rather than lecturing you on the nonsensical "physics" involved in the story, it simply draws you in as you and the characters experience the same maddening confusion about what the holy heck is happening.

 

Watch this movie. It's on Netflix. (And unlike Europa Report, everyone doesn't die in the end, so classylady can watch it without fear.)

[bytebear]

That is the most complicated time travel movie ever.  After you watch it, you need to get the timeline chart, which has at least six parallel times going on at once, and try to figure out which person is in which timeline with who.

[Vort]

That is the most complicated time travel movie ever.  After you watch it, you need to get the timeline chart, which has at least six parallel times going on at once, and try to figure out which person is in which timeline with who.

 

I googled "the most complicated time travel movie ever" after reading this, and smiled at the top two responses.

[bytebear]

Two independent thoughts.

 

One thing I liked was that time travel had logical limits.  The machine had to exist in order for you to use it, even in the past, so you had to turn it on, wait, and then use it to get back to the time you turned it on.  So no going back to the days of the Dinosaur.  I also liked the idea that you could sort of get around this limitation by taking a second time machine in the past with you, so even if you had a fixed time in the past, you could create multiple time machine launch points from one time machine.

 

But, ultimately, my biggest issue with time travel in all it's forms is that it denies the conservation of matter.  If you go back in time, there are now two of you, but that would mean the matter that makes up your person had to be created from something.  And what happened to the matter that occupied the space that you now occupy? That's almost why I like the Star Trek version of multiple universes, so at least the possibility of "swapping" matter from one universe to another conserves the law (albeit not in most stories).

[bytebear]

Here are two graphics to explain the time travel of Primer.

 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Time_Travel_Method-2.svg

 

 

[Vort]

I'll have to look at that at some point, but first I want to rewatch the movie and see what I can figure out.

[The Folk Prophet]

I'm in a totally cynical* mood apparently, because what I read in your post was something akin to: "This movie was awesome. It wasn't entertaining AT ALL!" 

 

:)

 

*may not quite be the right word...but...at least partially covers it.

[bytebear]

The plot is interesting, but it's also very confusing.  Once you "get" what's going on, you feel like you need to start the movie over to understand what you figured out.  (which is why Vort wants to rewatch it).