| Primer |
 |
| Directed by |
Shane Carruth |
| Produced by |
Shane Carruth |
| Written by |
Shane Carruth |
| Starring |
Shane Carruth
David Sullivan |
| Music by |
Shane Carruth |
| Cinematography |
Shane Carruth |
| Editing by |
Shane Carruth |
| Distributed by |
ThinkFilm |
| Release date(s) |
October 8, 2004 |
| Running time |
77 minutes |
| Country |
United States |
| Language |
English |
| Budget |
$7,000 |
| Gross revenue |
$424,760 |
Primer is a 2004 American science fiction film about the accidental discovery of time travel. The film was written, directed and produced by Shane Carruth, a mathematician and a former engineer, and was completed on a budget of $7,000.[1]
Primer is of note for its extremely low budget, experimental plot structure and complex technical dialogue, which Carruth chose not to 'dumb down' for the sake of his audience. One reviewer said that "anybody who claims [to] fully understand what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar."[2] The film collected the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004 before securing a limited release in US cinemas, and has since gained a cult following.
Plot
The operation of time travel in
Primer.
The principal characters are Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), two engineers who create a device which will allow an object or person to travel backward in time. The pair initially use the device to cheat on the stock market, but are ultimately unable to resist the temptation to meddle with every aspect of their lives. Through recklessness they create increasingly complex paradoxes, and ultimately their newfound power begins to destroy their friendship.
The film is set in the early 21st century and takes place in the industrial park and suburban tract-home fringes of an unnamed U.S. city. Four engineers—Aaron, Abe, Robert, and Phillip—work for a large corporation during the day, and run a side business out of Aaron's garage at night, building and selling error-checking devices for computer motherboards. With the proceeds of this work, they fund pet science projects.
After an argument over which project the group should tackle next, Aaron and Abe independently begin work on a device which reduces the weight of any object. Although the device works as intended, it has an unexpected side effect: Abe discovers that they have accidentally created a time machine. He tells Aaron, and after some experimentation, they cut Robert and Phillip out of the group on the pretense that the garage has to be fumigated.
Abe and Aaron build two more machines—all of which are referred to as "the box" throughout the film—each large enough to hold a person. Their utility is limited compared to traditional depictions of time travel: the boxes can only transport the user to a point in time during which they are switched on, and only at "normal" temporal speed. For standard use as a time travel device, the box is activated at the point in time the user wants to travel back to. Once the user wishes to travel back to this point, they turn off the machine and, before it "winds down", enter it. They remain in the box for the amount of time since it was activated, and may then exit at the point of activation. For example, if the machine is turned on at noon, and the user waits six hours until 6 p.m., then turns off and enters the machine and waits inside a further six hours, they will exit at the original activation point of noon. Staying in the machine would cause the user to continuously cycle back and forth between 6 p.m. and noon, with the ability to exit the machine at either endpoint. Abe and Aaron are never shown to leave the machine at any point other than the starting point. Severe aging is shown by objects left in the box and removed at the Off-point in the cycle.
Abe and Aaron initially use the time machine to play on the stock market, but as their views on how the time travel works evolve, they gradually become more adventurous with their trips. Their experimentation is cut short by the unexpected appearance of Thomas Granger (Chip Carruth), the group's original sponsor, who has apparently used one of the boxes to travel back in time for unknown reasons (the film's voiceover remarks that the reason is "unknowable"). Granger collapses and becomes comatose, Aaron remarking it only seems to happen when he is near or in contact with Abe. Abe is disturbed by this turn of events, ultimately concluding that time travel is too dangerous. He subsequently attempts to prevent his past self from using the machine for time travel—thereby nullifying all of its consequences—by using another machine, that he built secretly, to travel back to a point prior to his broaching the subject of time travel with Aaron.
However, unknown to Abe, Aaron has already found this "failsafe" machine and has been using it to repeatedly redo the events of a party in which an attendee enters with a shotgun, intending to use it on Rachel Granger; Aaron attempts to intervene and get the gunman arrested so that he can become a hero, also concerned that his later actions are unpredictable if he were not stopped. Aaron has also replaced the failsafe with a duplicate—which he took back in time using the "real" failsafe—preventing Abe from undoing Aaron's actions.
Having travelled back in time using the duplicate failsafe machine, Abe goes to meet Aaron and collapses. It is revealed that Aaron has been using a recording to recite their conversation from earlier in the film. After realizing that Abe has used the duplicate failsafe, Aaron explains himself. He has actually used the failsafe twice by this point. His first attempt ended in failure so he went back again, this time with a recording of his conversations from the first attempt to prevent changing events excessively. After encountering and fighting with the previous version of himself (who went back the first time), they agreed to let the Aaron who went back twice to continue his attempts.
The pair begins to experience side effects from time travel, including bleeding from the ears and difficulty with writing. They agree to try to change the events of the party together and eventually succeed. With their mutual deception of one another destroying their friendship, and their very different views on the use of the machines for time travel, they part ways. One Aaron leaves the country and it is suggested that the other Aaron (the narrator) exits the timeline in a box. Abe stays behind to continue his plan of attempting to prevent the original Abe and Aaron from this timeline—who have no idea of what the others have done—from ever using the machines for time travel, suggesting that he would tamper with the machines in the hope that their doubles would think the experiment a failure and move on to other projects.
It is revealed that the narrator of the movie is the Aaron who came back in the failsafe the first time, and that his "narration" is actually a phone call to someone (never indicated in the film) that the narrator believes he owes a "debt" to. The conjecture is that the narrator is speaking to the Aaron from this timeline who knows nothing about time travel as he was drugged and placed in the attic. The last scene in the film shows one of the Aarons (though which of the three is not made clear) instructing a team of French-speaking workers to line the walls of a warehouse with metal plates, as he begins construction on a building-sized machine.
Themes
Carruth's goal was to portray scientific discovery in a down-to-earth and realistic manner. He argued that many breakthrough scientific discoveries occur by accident, in locations no more glamorous than Aaron's garage.[1]
"Whether it involved the history of the number zero or the invention of the transistor, two things stood out to me. First is that the discovery that turns out to be the most valuable is usually dismissed as a side-effect. Second is that prototypes almost never include neon lights and chrome. I wanted to see a story play out that was more in line with the way real innovation takes place than I had seen on film before."[1]
Carruth has said he intended the central theme of the film to be the breakdown of Abe and Aaron's relationship,[3] and their inability to morally cope with newfound power:
"First thing, I saw these guys as scientifically accomplished but ethically, morons. They never had any reasons before to have ethical questions. So when they're hit with this device they're blindsided by it. The first thing they do is make money with it. They're not talking about the ethics of altering your former self."[4]
Cast
Abe and Aaron test their experimental superconductor.
- Shane Carruth as Aaron
- David Sullivan as Abe
- Casey Gooden as Robert
- Anand Upadhyaya as Phillip
- Carrie Crawford as Kara
- Jay Butler as Metalshop Worker
- John Carruth as Man On Couch #1
- Juan Tapia as Man On Couch #2
- Ashley Warren as Hostess
- Samantha Thomson as Rachel Granger
- Chip Carruth as Thomas Granger
- Delaney Price as Laney
- Jack Pyland as Aaron's Co-worker
- Keith Bradshaw as Clean Room Technician
- Ashok Upadhyaya as Laboratory Technician
- Brandon Blagg as Will
- Jon Cook as Will's Cousin
- David Joyner as Rachel's Date
- Eric De Soualhat as Translator
Carruth cast himself as Aaron after having trouble finding actors who could "break ... the habit of filling each line with so much drama."[1] Most of the other actors are either friends or family members.
Production
While writing the script, Carruth studied physics to help him make Abe and Aaron's technical dialogue sound authentic. He took the unusual step of eschewing contrived exposition, and tried instead to portray the shorthand phrases and jargon used by working scientists. This realist philosophy carried over into production design. The time machine itself is a plain gray box, with a distinctive electronic "hum" created by overlaying the sounds of a mechanical grinder and a car engine, rather than a processed digital effect. Carruth also set the story in unglamorous industrial parks and suburban tract homes.[1]
Carruth chose to deliberately obfuscate the film's plot to mirror the complexity and confusion created by time travel. As he said in a 2004 interview: "This machine and Abe and Aaron's experience are inherently complicated so it needed to be that way in order for the audience to be where Abe and Aaron are, which was always my hope."[3]
Primer was filmed in five weeks, on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas.[1] It was produced on a budget of only $7,000,[4] and a skeleton crew of five. Shane Carruth acted as writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor, and music composer.[5] He also stars in the film as Aaron, and many of the other characters are played by his friends and family. The small budget required conservative use of the Super 16mm filmstock.[1] The extremely low shooting ratio of 2:1 meant they had to carefully limit the number of takes. Every shot in the film was meticulously storyboarded on 35mm stills.[3] Carruth created a distinctive flat, overexposed look for the film by using fluorescent lighting, non-neutral color temperatures, high-speed film stock, and filters.[1]
After principal photography, Carruth took two years to fully post-produce Primer. He has since said that this experience was so arduous that he almost abandoned the film on several occasions.[3]
Physics and science
- Aaron and Abe start the film by attempting to create a device to somehow counter the effects of gravity. They have plans for such a device from another development team, but wish to improve on the viability of the design. Their main approach to achieve this is to drop the coolant bath for the required superconductors. They instead increase the transition temperature of the superconductor to "something more usable" by "knock[ing] out the interior magnetic field." The machine operates on the principles of the Meissner Effect. The characters allude to this as they design the machine.
- Aaron and Abe require palladium to build their machine. This is the reason they take the catalytic converter from a car (catalytic converters contain small amounts of palladium).
- The principles of time travel in the film are inspired by Feynman diagrams.[6] Physicists use Feynman diagrams to model the interaction between elementary particles. In some cases this can be an electron and a positron, created from the transformation of energy in a photon (known as pair production). The positron would be indistinguishable from an electron traveling backward in time. Thus, Feynman diagrams depict these interactions as being the same when happening forward or backward in time.[6]
Distribution
Carruth secured a North American distribution deal with THINKFilm after the company's head of theatrical distribution, Mark Urman, saw the film at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Although he and Carruth made a "handshake agreement" during the festival, Urman reported that the actual negotiation of the deal was the longest he had ever been involved with, in part due to Carruth's specific demands over how much control over the film he would retain. The film went on to take $424,760 at the box office.[8]
Original score
On October 8, 2004, the Primer score was released on Amazon[9] and iTunes. All music was created by Shane Carruth.
Reception
Primer received broadly positive reviews in the mainstream press. The website Metacritic rated Primer at 68 out of 100,[10] while the similar site Rotten Tomatoes reported that 72% of the critics that saw the film gave it positive reviews,[11] and the site listed it as one of the best science fiction films "for the thinking man."[12]
Many reviewers were impressed by the film's originality. Dennis Lim of The Village Voice said that it was "the freshest thing the genre has seen since 2001,"[13] while in The New York Times, A. O. Scott wrote that Carruth had "the skill, the guile and the seriousness to turn a creaky philosophical gimmick into a dense and troubling moral puzzle."[14] Scott also enjoyed the film's realistic depiction of scientists at work, saying that Carruth had an "impressive feel for the odd, quiet rhythms of small-scale research and development."[14]
There was also praise for Carruth's ability to maintain high production values on a minuscule budget, with Roger Ebert declaring: "The movie never looks cheap, because every shot looks as it must look."[15] Ty Burr of The Boston Globe commented that "aspects of Primer are so low-rent as to evoke guffaws", but added that "the homemade feel is part of the point."[16]
The film's unusually complex plot and dense dialogue proved controversial. Scott Tobias writes for The A.V. Club: "The banter is heavy on technical jargon and almost perversely short on exposition; were it not for the presence of voiceover narration, the film would be close to incomprehensible."[17] While for the Los Angeles Times, Carina Chocano writes: "sticklers for linear storytelling are bound to be frustrated by narrative threads that start promisingly, then just sort of fall off the spool."[18] Some reviewers were entirely put off by the film's obfuscated narrative. Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter complained that Primer "nearly gets lost in a miasma of technical jargon and scientific conjecture."[10]
The film has been selected to be part of The A.V. Club's New Cult Canon.[17]
Awards
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h "Primer Official Site: Story/Production" (PDF). http://www.primermovie.com/story.html#qa. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
- ^ D'Angelo, Mike (2004-11-01). "The Best Movie We've Seen Since Tomorrow". Esquire. Hearst Communications, Inc. http://www.esquire.com/features/movies/ESQ1104-NOV_MOVIES. Retrieved 2008-05-19.
- ^ a b c d Murray, Rebecca (2004-10-22). "Interview with Shane Carruth". About.com. The New York Times Company. http://movies.about.com/od/primer/a/primer102104_2.htm. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
- ^ a b Mitchell, Wendy. "Shane Carruth on "Primer"; The Lessons of a First-Timer". indieWIRE.com. http://www.indiewire.com/article/dvd_re-run_interview_shane_carruth_on_primer_the_lessons_of_a_first-timer/. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
- ^ Primer at the Internet Movie Database
- ^ a b "A Primer Primer". The Village Voice. http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-10-05/film/a-primer-primer. Retrieved 2009-01-24.
- ^ "Film Profiles: Primer". Variety. Reed Elsevier Inc. http://www.variety.com/profiles/Film/main/152428/Primer.html?dataSet=1. Retrieved 2008-05-20.
- ^ "Primer Score". Amazon. 2004-10-08. http://www.amazon.com/Primer-Score/dp/B00120ANJK. Retrieved 2009-05-29.
- ^ a b "Metacritic". http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/primer?q=Primer. Retrieved 2008-05-15.
- ^ "Rotten Tomatoes". http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/primer/. Retrieved 2008-09-28.
- ^ Jeff Giles. "Ten Sci-Fi Flicks for the Thinking Man". Rotten Tomatoes. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/children_of_men/news/1789873/3/ten_sci_fi_flicks_for_the_thinking_man. Retrieved 2009-01-15.
- ^ Lim, Dennis (2004-09-28). "36-Hour Party People". The Village Voice. Village Voice Media Holdings, LLC. http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0440,lim,57301,20.html. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
- ^ a b Scott, A. O. (2004-10-08). "From a Suburban Garage, a New Take on Time Travel". The New York Times. http://movies.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/movies/08PRIM.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
- ^ Ebert, Roger (2004-10-29). "Reviews: Primer". Rogerebert.com. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041028/REVIEWS/40920013/1001. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
- ^ Burr, Ty (2004-10-15). "'Primer' is an entertaining overload of techno possibilities". The Boston Globe. NY Times Co. http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=7295. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
- ^ a b Tobias, Scott (2008-04-01). "The New Cult Canon: Primer". The Onion A.V. Club. Onion Inc. http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/the_new_cult_canon_primer. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
- ^ Chocano, Carina (2004-10-22). "Reviews: Primer". The Los Angeles Times. http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-primer22nuoct22,2,765989.story. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
- ^ a b "Sundance Film Festival: Films Honoured 1985-2007" (pdf). Sundance Institute. http://sundance.org/festival/press_industry/pdf/Sundance%20Film%20Festival%20Awards%201985-2007.pdf. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
- ^ "Awards and Nominations; Critical Acclaim". Primer website. http://www.primermovie.com/acclaim.html. Retrieved 2007-07-05.
- ^ "Awards History". The London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film. http://www.sci-fi-london.com/archive/history.php. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
External links
