Has anyone seen this movie ?
The fair Jessica and I watched it on the IFC channel the other night. Apparently, it was made for something like $7,000 and won best drama at Sundance. Perhaps even more impressively it treats time travel intelligently. Or at least it seems to. The movie really sucks you in at first, by showing young engineers – shades of Office Space types – trying to figure out how to get their invention working and funded. We never quite know what the contraption does, but after a while they figure out it’s kinda-sorta a time machine. The techno-jargon is often hard to follow, but unlike idiotic techno-jargon in most movies – The Core, for example* — it sounds plausible, in part because it is hard to follow.
I liked the movie and I really wanted to like it more but – and you knew there had to be a “but” – it lost me towards the end. I thought I’d hung on a little while longer than my bride, but when she asked me to explain what I thought was happening I realized I didn’t really know either. Reading some of the reviews at IMDB, it seems we weren’t alone. A friend of mine always likes to say whenever a low budget Indy movie gets attention, “Sure, it was ok. But none of the problems were anything a $100 million budget, some huge explosions, a bitchin’ soundtrack and Bruce Willis couldn’t make better.” His point is that a lot of folks like Indy movies precisely because they think there’s something inherently high-brow about being low-budget. I for one would love to see Primer re-made. It doesn’t need a huge budget. But maybe a couple million dollars to allow Shane Carruth (the writer, director and star) to flesh out some of this stuff better. It definitely deserves it.
* For the premier site on science in movies, go here, and find their review of The Core.