|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
PRIMER
Rating: 
USA. 2003.
Director/Screenplay/Producer/Music/Production Design – Shane Carruth, Photography – Shane Carruth & Anand Upadhyaya. Production Company – none listed.
Cast:
Shane Carruth (Aaron), David Sullivan (Abram Terger), Carrie Crawford (Kara), Casey Gooden (Robert), Anand Upadhyaya (Phillip)
Plot: Aaron and Abe, two good friends living in Texas, come together to construct an engineering project. But after building a working prototype of the machine, they discover that they have no idea what it does. It cultivates bacteria in rapidly accelerated time-periods and produces strange physical readings when objects are placed inside. They experiment with the idea of sending an object between the two poles in a way that interrupts and reverses its passage. After doing so, they are startled to see themselves emerge from a storage facility. They enter the locker to find a much more elaborate working version of the machine and realize they can use the reversal method to emerge further ahead or behind in time. They use this to obtain future stock results, all the while keeping their present selves out of the way in a hotel room in order to prevent causal corruption. But they soon find themselves trapped in a nightmare of compounding errors as they try to correct mistakes.
Primer arrives following quite reasonable acclaim, having won the award for Best Drama at the 2004 Sundance Festival. It’s a highly intelligent and strikingly original sf film. In tone it falls somewhere between Pi (1998) and Startup.com (2001), at least during its first half – of Pi’s sense of an all-important scientific breakthrough that is going to bend reality, the nature of which is essentially withheld from the audience, and of Startup.com in the sense of a camera crew following two pioneers documentary-style through an important new development. The film has been made on a minimalist budget and shot entirely on location on digital video. It’s the work of newcomer director Shane Carruth, who conducts most of the major tasks behind the camera and also plays one of the two leads – he’s the dark-haired scientist. Expect to hear more from Carruth soon.
Primer has certainly attracted some mixed responses. Audiences walked out of this film festival screening confused and puzzled about what was going on. It is certainly a film that insists that you work with it and pays no heed to anybody that cannot keep up. At times it feels like a film where several crucial incidents have been removed from the storyline or else the story condensed in some way. I came out at the very least wanting a number of points clarified and answered. Who set up the apparatus that the two characters find in the storage container? What is the significance of the person pursuing them? Why is someone unconscious in the guest bedroom? I also felt like I needed more illumination regarding the scene where someone starts shooting at a cocktail party and what significance it has to the causal mix-ups. The trouble is that some important plot points are introduced so casually that we don’t understand their significance amid the density of information presented and are then left struggling to try and tie them together. If one dare suggest, this is a film where a more mainstream and commercial handling might have made something that was a good deal easier to understand.
Despite being difficult to follow, there is a compulsive fascination to the film. There’s the sense of seeing two people rationally puzzling over a scientific phenomenon they don’t understand. Carruth has his camera sit and observe naturalistically, as though the film were a documentary, and the reactions of the characters are all underplayed, which adds considerably to the effect. The dialogue all comes densely layered, with the two actors playing it as though they meant every word of it, and Carruth runs it all over the top of itself in a way that it is the dialogue ends up driving the pace of the film. The initial scenes with the two engineers piecing together the machine and puzzling over the increasingly stranger readings hold something that is intensely captivating. There is an even greater fascination when we get to them moving through and editing time, in seeing some of the reactions, and the increasing panic as everything starts going out of control. Even though one doesn’t really understand why, the ending eventually arrived at becomes something quite disturbing.
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2003 list. Nominee for Best Original Screenplay at this site’s Best of 2003 Awards).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
|