Rent Primer (2004)
3.1 of 5 from 225 ratings
1h 14min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- "Primer" is set in the industrial park/suburban tract-home fringes of an unnamed contemporary city where two young engineers, Abe (David Sullivan) and Aaron (Shane Carruth), are members of a small group of men who work by day for a large corporation while conducting extracurricular experiments on their own time in a garage. While tweaking their current project, a device that reduces the apparent mass of any object placed inside it by blocking gravitational pull, they accidentally discover that it has some highly unexpected capabilities - ones that could enable them to do and to have seemingly anything they want. Taking advantage of this unique opportunity is the first challenge they face. Dealing with the consequences is the next.
- Actors:
- Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya, Carrie Crawford, Jay Butler, John Carruth, Juan Tapia, Ashley Warren, Samantha Thomson, Chip Carruth, Delaney Price, Jack Pyland, Keith Bradshaw, Ashok Upadhyaya, Brandon Blagg, Jon Cook, David Joyner, Eric De Soualhat, Kevin Lucero Less
- Directors:
- Shane Carruth
- Writers:
- Shane Carruth
- Studio:
- Tartan
- Genres:
- Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers
- Awards:
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Reviews (8) of Primer
Very, very clever indeed - Primer review by RP
Wow - what a brilliant, complex and confusing film! I liked it very much, but I needed a little help and to watch it twice, and I mean to watch it yet again - it really is that good.
'Primer' is a film about time travel. Don't laugh - and don't expect a Hollywood blockbuster with lots of special effects. 'Primer' isn't like that at all. It deals with the paradoxes that arise through time travel, and the possibility that multiple versions of a person may therefore coexist, and what might happen when these different versions of a person interact with each other.
'Primer' is clearly a low budget film, with two central characters and a lot of talking. You will need to concentrate very carefully to pick up the clues as to what is happening - but it really is worthwhile spending the effort. At first you will be confused, but once you 'get it', you will realise what a deep and thought-provoking story you have seen.
It may help your understanding to read the FAQ about the film on IMDB, and follow the links to read one of the detailed explanations.
'Primer' is very, very clever indeed. 5/5 stars. Highly recommended.
4 out of 4 members found this review helpful.
Thinking persons Back To The Future - Primer review by CP Customer
Excellent film done on a low budget. You're never really sure what the plot is until close to the end but you keep guessing and guessing, and you're always wrong! A low budget film though so the audio is bareably audible in key parts so watch with the subtitles on!
3 out of 4 members found this review helpful.
Made for $7000 dollars - Primer review by CP Customer
Good film that is worth a watch....
* Watch with subtitles on as it's very wordy at points and audio not always that clear
* Try and concentrate (turn off laptop/ipad)
* Even after concentrating throughout the film factor in an hour or so after it to read up or watch explainations on Youtube
It astounds me that someone is able to come up with a film like this with such an involved/intelligent idea, it's real brainiac stuff!
2 out of 2 members found this review helpful.
Critic review
Primer review by Adrijan Arsovski - Cinema Paradiso
Primer is a great, well, “primer” (lame pun intended and forced) in pure narrative-driven storytelling that happens to use film as a medium (and few cameras as well). In fact, Primer is the most mind-bendingly bending films of the last 20 years, and not because of its convoluted plot (which it undoubtedly is), but because underneath it all, you can almost feel as if there is an undeniable logic to it all – like looking at your smartphone without knowing the specifics of how it’s assembled, but knowing that it works.
The film is directed by Shane Carruth on a minuscule budget, starring friends and family and Shane himself as the leading man. Make no doubt, Primer is not a film about characters (i.e. drama), but rather an experiment in a string of ideas which happen to co-exist simultaneously with the main narrative thread – time travel. Now, time travel is a paradox in and of itself since it breaks the current physical laws of the Universe that we all inhabit. However, this makes it a perfectly reasonable idea to be used in order to produce hypothetical scenarios, mostly in fiction, about how things would’ve turned out if it was somehow possible for a human to “wield” this power. And usually what happens is, because of the undeniable hubris of going against the known physical laws, these “time travelers” often end up getting the short end of the stick (fantasy time travel excluded). Or in other words: time travel comes at a very high cost, maybe even a cost that isn’t worth it for the one undergoing this treatment.
Primer talks about a different form of time travel, a more advanced one if you will: nested time travel several layers deep. This is why most people (me included) would probably get lost in the timeline of this film, because the human mind is only capable of remembering 5-7 terms in its short memory before losing them to oblivion. This is why Christopher Nolan gave us 3-4 layers of “dreams”, and he was careful to color and populate each of these dreams differently from both the preceding one and the anteceding dream. Shane Carruth didn’t have the budget, nor the knowledge on how to do this, and this is exactly why Primer is so convoluted yet hellishly smart all at once.
I repeat, against the popular opinion, Primer is not a film about characters but a cinematic research in the idea of nested time travel (and possibly, SPOLER ALERT, clones).
Proceed at our own caution, and follow up this film with a diagram or two online.