Prime Example

Not long ago, Netflix tossed an obscure recommendation my way: a small, independent sci-fi film called Primer. I'd never heard of it, and didn't know a thing about it. But I've sometimes had some truly pleasant movie experiences watching a film with little or no foreknowledge of what I'd be seeing. So I decided to keep in the dark, and see what there was to see.

I think if I had dug into just what the film was, I would have been more intrigued. The movie was written, directed, and produced by a man named Shane Carruth. He stars in it and wrote the music too. He filled out the cast mostly with family and friends. That's because he made the entire thing for $7,000. And while it does certainly look like a low-budget film, I would never have dreamed it was $7,000 low. It never feels like any compromises were made in the film's creation. It looks like the movie "should look."

And that really fires my imagination. Hell, I could come up with $7,000 to make a movie. Could I makes one as solid and professional-looking as this? More than anything in the movie itself, the ingenuity and resourcefulness of even bringing the film into existence really tickles my brain.

But as an added bonus, so does the movie itself. It's the story of a group of engineers who spend their nights off from their respective jobs working in a garage trying all sorts of different experiments. They're trying to discover something (they really don't care what) they might use to make a name for themselves. And in the first act of the movie, that's exactly what two of the engineers do. But what they accidentally invent has all sorts of scientific, ethical, and personal ramifications to it that begins to fracture their friendship.

I hinted earlier that the movie looks as it should. It also feels like it should. That writer-actor-director-producer-composer turns out to be even more of a renaissance man; in life, he's a mathematician and former engineer. So his sci-fi movie is starkly authentic. Here's what I mean: when you hear technobabble on a show like Star Trek, it rings false. You can see the "seams" of the craftsmanship, it exists to solve a problem, and it somehow feels dumbed down for the audience. In Primer, you flat out aren't going to understand half the technobabble (unless you're an engineer yourself, perhaps?). It isn't solving a problem, it's the characters working through a problem. It's not dumbed down. But it's also not wasting screen time either, because the character of these characters is being revealed in the ways they interact with each other.

And that's before you even really get to the meat of the plot, when the two discover what it really is that they've invented. Any synopsis you read of this film will undoubtedly tell you what that is in the first sentence; I'm going to withhold that information from you as I did from myself before seeing the movie. I think it's cooler that way. Suffice it to say that there are some tricky consequences here that these characters are too morally immature to handle.

But the movie does have a few flaws. It's surprisingly short at barely over an hour and 15 minutes, and I think this is because it doesn't really get into the broader issues that could have been in play here. The first act is about making the discovery, the second about abusing it, and only in a very brief 15 minute final act do the larger issues surface -- and they aren't given much space for exploration when they do. The film remains focused on the two men themselves and their relationship, which I suppose is consistent in tone with the whole, but feels like stopping short on what is otherwise such a hardcore sci-fi premise.

Also related to the briefness of that final act, I found it rather hard to follow. I think myself a fairly bright person. When it comes to movies, if I get lost (which is rare), I will generally attribute that to bad writing -- a lack of "connective tissue" -- rather than my lagging intellect. This movie lost me a bit at the end. I don't want to attribute it to bad writing, because the first hour of the movie was so solid. But neither do I want to lay the blame on my own intellect, you know? In any case, be it a lapse in my attention or a disinterest in the actual conclusion of the story by the writer, things get a little fast and loose (and muddy) at the end.

But still, the movie is entertaining overall, and very thought-provoking both in what you see on the screen, and what went into putting it there. I rate Primer a B, and definitely give it the thumbs up to anyone who likes "real" science fiction, not just the glitzier version of it more often presented in film and television.