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Primer (2004)

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From Time Out London

Made ‘for the price of a used car,’ as its resourceful writer-director-editor-lead puts it, this brain-teasing procedural poses the tough, even frightening questions of speculative fiction at its best, embedding them in a dazed, skewed verité of suburban identikit housing and impenetrable shop talk. Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) toil as engineers for corporate firms by day, but reserve their real intellectual passions for their off-hours garage project. In a sickly-green fluorescent glow, they tinker with a device known as ‘the Box’, which will afford them an opportunity to seize authorship of their lives in ways most can only dream about. Be careful what you wish for… Read no further if you want to enter ‘Primer’ unprimed, just keep in mind that the movie contorts itself into a confounding pretzel logic that may treat your grey matter like Play-Doh. Imagining character and personality as readily reprogrammable, and drolly observational about the practical inconveniences of time travel (‘I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon’), the film suggests that possessing power over time makes an irritable tyrant of the ingenious inventor, his every moment determined in advance. Carruth boldly recreates the head-full-of-wet-sand bewilderment of profound jet lag; if you think you’re confused, just imagine how the temporally scrambled characters must feel. All the information is there – it’s up to us to piece it together – which is to say that this film imagines its viewers to be smart, possessed of a decent attention span and game for a challenge. It doesn’t happen all that often.

Author: JW

Time Out London Issue 1826: August 15-24 2005

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