No time travel movie can make much sense. Any actions to explain what's going on only magnify the inherent plot holes and logical inconsistencies. "Primer" makes the most sense as a time travel movie because it makes no sense at all. Through whispered conversations and experiments, four buddies (Shane Carruth, the writer/director is one of them; they're all deliberately nondescript) "plausibly" happen upon a working time machine in their garage. "Primer" has little of the standard sci-fi clichés. Rather, time travel is about as glamorous as an old homebrew computer club.
"Primer" realizes the power of time travel to destroy the world. When the main inventors utilize their machine, they create duplicates of themselves in the same time. Bunkered in a darkened hotel room, they're as careful as they can be to not contact themselves or the outside world.
But they forget one important thing: they don't know what their future selves will do. Once the time machine is created, any slip from any of them, at any time, will exponentially lead to total chaos. "Primer" ends on this note. Nobody knows exactly what's happening, but it's not good, and it's not going to get any better.
2 comments:
Actually, "The Bad News Bears" got me thinking about "Primer." It stretches cheap location filming even more, utilizing the director's garage, rental storage space, and hotel rooms.
i'm glad you reviewed this steve. for some reason, i liked it...and i couldn't agree with you more about how much of a problem time travel movies are... where this succeeds is in the lack of glamour and the (i'm assuming) accurate portrayal of engineering dudes. where it fails is in the fact that it is not an entertaining movie at all.
Post a Comment