Originally released October 8, 2004:

I was intrigued about Primer because I had been told it was classy, smart sci-fi that’s so often missing in today’s entertainment line-up (see: Sci-Fi channel’s Mansquito). It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and the critical reviews had been generally very positive. So my expectations were high for a well wrought, high brow film analyzing time travel. What I got was one long, pretentious, incomprehensible, poorly paced and shot techno lecture. Oh it got bad. Oh did it get bad.

Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) run a team of inventors out of their garage. Their newest invention seems promising but they’re still confused about what it does. Aaron and Abe’s more commercially minded partners want to patent it and sell it. Aaron and Abe inspect their invention further and discover it has the ability to distort time. They invent larger versions and time travel themselves and thus create all kinds of paradoxes and loops and confusion for themselves and a viewing audience.

Watching Primer is like reading an instruction manual. The movie is practically crushed to death by techno terminology and all kinds of geek speak. The only people that will be able to follow along are those well-versed in quantum physics and engineering. Indeed, Primer has been called an attempt to make a “realistic time-travel movie,” which means no cars that can go 88 miles per hour. That’s fine and dandy but it makes for one awfully boring movie.

Primer would rather confound an audience than entertain them. There is a distinct difference between being complicated and being hard to follow. You’d need a couple volumes of Cliff Notes just to follow along Primer‘s talky and convoluted plot. I was so monumentally bored by Primer that I had to eject the DVD after 30 minutes. I have never in my life started a film at home and then turned it off, especially one I paid good money to rent, but after so many minutes of watching people talk above my head in a different language (techno jargon) I had reached my breaking point. Primer will frustrate most viewers because most will not be able to follow what is going on, and a normal human being can reasonably only sit for so long in the dark.

I did restart Primer and watched it to its completion, a scant 75 minutes long. The last 20 minutes is easier to grasp because it does finally deal with time travel and re-staging events. It’s a very long time to get to anything comprehensible. I probably should watch Primer again in all fairness but I have the suspicion that if I did my body would completely shut down on me in defense. Some people will love this and call it visionary, but those will be a very select group. It’s not just that Primer is incomprehensible but the film is also horrifically paced. When you don’t know what’s being said and what’s going on then scenes tend to drag because there is no connection. This movie is soooooo slow and it’s made all the worse by characters that are merely figureheads, dialogue that’s confusing and wooden, and a story that would rather spew ideas than a plot.

Writer/director/star Shane Carruth seems to have high ambitions but he has no empathy for an audience. Films can be dense and thought-provoking but they need to be accessible. Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko is a sci-fi mind bender but it’s also an accessible, relatable, enjoyable movie that’s become a cult favorite. Carruth also seems to think that shooting half the movie out of focus is a good idea.

I’m not against a smart movie, nor am I against science fiction that attempts to explore profound concepts and ideals. What I am against, however, is wasting my time with a tech lecture disguised as quality entertainment. Primer is obtuse, slow, convoluted, frustrating and pretentiously impenetrable. After finally finishing Primer, I scanned the DVD spine and noticed it said, “Thriller.” I laughed so hard I almost fell over. The only way Primer could be a thriller is because you’ll be racing the clock for it to finish.

Nate’s Grade: C-

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

I tried, dear reader. I had every intention of giving 2004’s Primer another chance, wanting to allow the distance of time to perhaps make the movie more palatable for my present-day self than it was when I was in my early twenties and irritated by this low-budget, high-concept Sundance DIY time travel indie. I thought with two decades of hindsight, I’d be able to find the brilliance that people cited back in 2004 where instead I only found maddening frustration. I consider myself a relatively intelligent individual, so I felt like I would be able to unpack what has been dubbed the most complex and realistic time travel movie ever created, let alone on a shoestring budget of only $7000, where the showcase was writer/director/star/editor/composer Shane Caruth’s intricate plotting. The whole intention with my re-watches is to give movies another chance and to honestly reflect upon why my feelings might have changed over time, for better or worse. That’s my intent, and while this day may have always been a matter of time for arriving, but I tried valiantly to watch Primer again and I quit. Yes, my apologies, but I tapped out.

I gave the movie twenty minutes before I came to the conclusion that I just wanted to do anything else with my time. I even tried watching a YouTube explanation video to give me a better summation, and even five minutes into that I came to the same conclusion that I wanted to do anything else with my fleeting sense of time. I think this is a case of accessibility and engagement.

Ultimately, this is the tale of two would-be inventors who keep reliving the same day to make money and win over a girl at a party. Reliving this day several times, with several iterations, and literally requiring a flowchart to keep it all together, is a lot of work for something that seemingly offers so little entertainment value beyond the academic pat on the back for being able to keep up with the inscrutable plotting. Look, I love time travel movies. I love the possibilities, the playfulness, the emphasis on ideas and casualty and imagination. I love the questions they raise and the dangers and, above all, the sheer fun. A time travel movie shouldn’t feel like you’re reading a book on arcane tax law. It needs to be, at the very least, interesting. Watching these two guys live out their lives, while on the peripheral more exciting things are happening with doubles, and we’re stuck with watching them migrate to this same party, or this same storage lockers and garages. It’s all so resoundingly low-stakes, even though betrayal and murder appear. I found this drama so powerfully uninteresting, and then structured and skewered and stacked to be an inscrutable, unknowable puzzle that makes you want to give up rather than engage. For me, there isn’t enough investment or intrigue to try and unpack this movie’s homework.

This is a lesson for me, as I have a newborn baby in my house, and sleep deprivation and fatigue are more a presence in my life, that I’m going to be more selective with what I choose to spend those moments of free time. Do I want to invest my time watching a movie I am not engaging with, that gives me so little to hold onto? When my friend Liz Dollard had her first child, she talked about not watching downer movies like 2016’s Manchester by the Sea, only having the emotional space for stories that wouldn’t be draining to her mental well-being. This meant low-stakes, uplifting, generally happy or familiar tales. I remember at the time thinking that she was willfully shuttling so many potential movies from her viewership, great films that could be challenging or depressing and deserving of being seen. Now, I completely get it, because after you’ve woken up several times during that night to feed a small child who has no means of communicating with you other than volcanic screaming, watching a long movie about human suffering can feel like a tall order. While Primer isn’t overwhelming as some kind of miserable dirge, it is too hard for me to access and gives me too little to hold onto.

As a film critic for over twenty-five years of my life, I try my best to thoughtfully analyze every movie I sit down to write about, and I try to think about potential audiences and the artistic intentions for them, and whether choices help or hinder those intentions. Not every movie is going to be for me just like any other work of media; there are countless musical artists that I will never willfully listen to but have their respective fan bases. I know there are people that love Primer, as hard as it is for me to fathom. I know there are people out there that leap to the challenge of keeping the nine iterations and timelines together as time confusingly folds upon itself. I know there are sci-fi enthusiasts that respect and appreciate the stripped-down, more “realistic” application of time travel. I know there are people who celebrate this movie, but I am not one of them. Primer is simply not for me, and that’s okay. Not every work of art will be for every person. I doubt I’ll ever come back to Primer again for the rest of my life, but there’s so many more movies to watch every day, so why spend precious time on a movie you’re just not clicking with?

Adios, Primer. To someone else, you’re a wonderful movie. To me, you’re, as I wrote in 2004, a “techno lecture” disguised as an impenetrable film exercise.

Re-View Grade: Undetermined