Director:
Shane Carruth
Starring:
Shane Carruth
David Sullivan
Casey Gooden
Anand Upadhyaya
Carrie Crawford
Release: 8 Oct. 04
IMDb
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Primer
BY: DAVID PERRY
“I can imagine no way in which this would be even remotely
safe,” says one of the engineers in the Sundance hit Primer. Doing
experiments in a garage (an Argon explosion would make the noise of a garage
band seem hushed), off-the-clock scientists Aaron (Carruth) and Abe
(Sullivan) have found a way to move matter through time. Adhering to the
Bill and Ted Rules of Time Travel, they concoct a way to insider trade that
makes Douglas Faneuil look like a relic of old-fashioned white-collar crime.
I don’t consider myself particularly blunt when it comes to myriad schemes
in films and books (I love Borges, for heaven’s sakes), but I spent most of
Primer trying to figure all this stuff out. Science, physics, and
theoretical mathematics are spat out like this is a senior seminar at MIT, a
astringent for someone like me and my two humanities and one communications
degrees. Worst of all, once I started to get a grasp of where the film was
going, I didn’t particularly care. It’s as if the filmmakers hoped to boggle
the minds of the scientifically-deficient viewers so they’d accept
everything as having this allure of intellect. Instead, the inane story is
only highlighted by the complexity of the exposition. Primer is like those
math application questions at the end of each section in your high school
algebra book: while trying to convince there’s a purpose to all this, one is
constantly aware that the application is secondary to the lesson.
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