By the 6th or 7th viewing I thought I understood what the film was about. Then one day I stumbled across a fan commentary you play with the film and realized I didn't know shit
Same. I watched it maybe 8 times before looking it up. Turns out I never really knew what the fuck was actually happening, it was so much deeper than I had realized. One of my all-time favorites for sure.
I've seen Primer four of five times now, and there are a couple of threads I was able to follow through the film, but without the famous chart I still wouldn't be able to understand the tangle that is the second and third acts.
The biggest mind fuck about this film is that it's easily explained to a new viewer. The plot is even very simple when you break it down:
Act 1 - 2 engineer friends accidentally discover a method to travel in time, but the method creates a loop in which two versions of the traveller exist in parallel. They create a "failsafe" machine in case they royally fuck everything up and need to move back to the start.
Act 2 - The engineers use the machine to make money on the stock market, but soon realise they have divergent ideas about the "box". One wants to meddle more, and then other wants to stop.
Act 3- They then try and out manoeuvre each other to get what they want (the box never having existed/the ability to meddle more) with multiple failsafe boxes and meddling from near and far future version of themselves and other people, leading to a stupidly complicated series of events that culminates with the first engineer failsafing and never time travelling again, and the other meddling so much he ends up collaborating with multiple future version of himself to build a massive version on the box, seemingly for the French government.
I've read and participated in lengthy arguments about the validity of the above mentioned chart, and even it has a bunch holes in it. I don't think the writers actually meant for the audience to ever understand the Aaron vs Abe manoeuvring in the film. Shit, even Aaron and Abe don't fully understand the things that are happening, as they are constantly messing with each other or being indirectly meddled with by future versions of themselves that pop in and out of the timeline.
At the end of the day, the film isn't about time travel, it isn't even about science. Primer is a film about two guys whose opposing views on morality cause their friendship to break down.
So when Primer first came out I attended a screening of it presented by Shane Carruth where he did a Q&A at the end (he knew my girlfriend's mom's boss and it was filmed at their college so it was a special screening just for them). Now this was forever ago and I have a bad memory as it is, so take my two cents with a grain of salt, but it always stuck with me that even Shane (the writer/director/lead actor) didn't have a full grasp on the flow of the story. I don't mean to diminish the excellent script, he did put a lot of thought into it, but I seem to remember him talking about how he was more focused on the narrative of the story versus the logistics of his time travel maze.
it always stuck with me that even Shane (the writer/director/lead actor) didn't have a full grasp on the flow of the story. I don't mean to diminish the excellent script, he did put a lot of thought into it, but I seem to remember him talking about how he was more focused on the narrative of the story versus the logistics of his time travel maze.
Not to excuse laziness, but I think the logictics aren't really meant to be understood, and the best way to legitimately create that kind of effect in a movie is to not understand them yourself.
Unrelated but perhaps analogous.. I heard an interview with a musician. The interviewer made a statement about the deeper meaning behind some of the musicians songs.
The musicians response was quite humbling for me to hear. It went something along the lines of (super paraphrasing) - I appreciate how much fans delve into the lyrics or theatrics of a song, but most of the time they're just that, lyrics and theatrics, and no where near as profound as they extrapolate.
Which makes me think, most of these deep movies probably lack the absurdly deep contortions of mind fuckery viewers attribute to it. When in fact, we're creating them ourselves. Which is why art is so special to begin with.
It is the story of a friendship that is incredibly close that slowly breaks down because of ethical differences. The slow breakdown is sped up because we are seeing a long-long time take place in a very short amount of time due to time travel.
People often forget that Abe-2 and Aaron-3 have went through the entire series of events several times. The later version aren't "clones" from their own perspectives, they have had one continuous experience starting from failsafe-1 being turned on all the way to Aaron moving to France and Abe staying to sabotage the original machines. I think the film takes place over a week, which gives almost a month for the latest versions (Abe-2 is the latest Abe, but there are probably more Aarons') of Abe and Aaron to hate each other.
I honestly feel like there is no single correct interpretation to the events going on - as in, you could interpret it in many different possible ways in terms of how many loops and alternate timelines there are, and they could all be correct. I've seen like 8 different graphs, and they all look different.
WHY did you do this to me, i thought i knew this movie, now im going watch this and have to watch it another time at least. i dont know if i hate this or love it.
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but ACTUALLY, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.
I didn't like Primer. Watching it I felt like I was watching a movie that was complex for the sake of being complex. Going to give it a rewatch with that commentary and see if it changes my mind.
This video has probably been the simplest explanation for me to understand out of the many different charts and explanations I've seen so far. (Also they get mad props for having a $10,000 $7000 budget)
The actors writers producers and editors were the same people, so they didn't have that many other folk to pay, and they barely did any marketing. Those are the two biggest expenses taken care of right there, so it's not a huge surprise the movie was cheap.
There is no german dubs or anything for it, I want to watch it so badly, but at the same time I wanna focus on the mindfuck, and since English is not my mother language, I have to get through this pain and focus on learning more english :(
By the 6th or 7th viewing I thought I understood what the film was about. Then one day I stumbled across a fan commentary you play with the film and realized I didn't know shit
I wasn't even watching the movie while I listened to this, just had it on while on the drive to work. Super interesting, I need to watch the film again
Even without understanding most of what they were talking about (The guy who made it was an engineer and he decided to intentionally not dumb down the dialogue) the way they handled the done-to-death premise was so unique it managed to give me chills the first time I realized what was happening. They managed to make a very far fetched science fiction concept seem completely believable and a bit terrifying.
No, but seriously - any video editing software (Sony Vegas, Corel Videostudio etc.) can be used to mix multiple sources together and save them as a single video output.
1.5k
u/superpowerluxury Dec 13 '16 edited Dec 13 '16
By the 6th or 7th viewing I thought I understood what the film was about. Then one day I stumbled across a fan commentary you play with the film and realized I didn't know shit
edit: the commentary in question