PRIMER (2004) This movie needs a decoder ring I think my brain just melted. I was following Primer for a while, but that last half hour or so was a big long whatthefuck. I can't entirely dismiss a movie I admit I don't understand, but it did not suggest to me that I would after another viewing, or another two or three. How many more eighty-minute pieces of my life would be required before I understood what the hell was going on here? I like it when a movie makes me think, but I tend to find it pretty tedious when what it wants me to think about is the cohesion of its plot mechanics, instead of its ideas, possibilities and implications. Made for the price of a well-used SUV, Primer stars Shane Carruth (also the director, writer, composer, cinematographer, producer and editor) and David Sullivan as two engineers who tire of running an unambitious hardware distro out of Carruth's garage, and instead follow Sullivan's ideas for putting together this machine which...what? There's more tech babble in the first twenty minutes of this movie than you'll hear in an entire season of Star Trek, and that's saying a preposterous lot - especially when so much of it is said by different characters at the same time. You can imagine how trying to understand what the characters are saying will be, for most people, a maddening exercise in futility. Primer's middle third is its most successful, playing with that sense of discovery and mystery as the machine's creators figure out more or less what it does, how they can make it profitable, and how they can fuck it all up with the most innocent oversight (he'd already fucked things up a little just by hearing the phone ring, but did he have to answer it?). It's in this middle third where the plot starts to veer out of control, but at least I still felt like it was supposed to be mysterious instead of just baffling. But that last third...damn! What am I supposed to make of it? How many times am I supposed to watch it before it comes together? Is it ever going to come together, or is it one of those David Lynch things where things only make sense in the most far-reaching speculations of the fans, who cackle cruelly at me for Not Getting It? I'm not taking all the blame for this one. Eighty minutes is a short movie by most standards, and cramming that much tech babble and layers of plot insanity into a movie with so little room to breathe feels like...misdirection, making me wonder what I'm being distracted from and why. This does not illuminate the movie's plot; it only provokes more questions about why it was presented as it was. Still, Primer never looks or feels like a cheapo $7000 movie, even though it is. Science fiction has remained largely untouched by the so-called indie movie revolution, because of the prohibitively monstrous budgets required by most moviemakers' idea of sci-fi. But ideas don't cost anything, and Primer has got plenty of those. If this can spark filmmakers' and audiences' interest in low-budget, idea-heavy sci-fi which has so far not been in evidence, then every confusing minute of it will be worth sitting through at least once. Curious side note about this movie: though the IMDb and every review I've read says this is PG-13, the copy I rented began with the MPAA's blue rating screen which said "This Motion Picture Has Been Rated R Restricted Brief Language by the Classification And Rating Administration". Brief language? What could they say that would get it an R, even mistakenly? I hear "motherfucker" gets you an R. Multiple "fuck"s will get you an R. I guess if you crammed them together in a short enough time, that would be brief. The objectionable language in Primer is as follows: 4 "What the hell"'s 1 "You pretentious prick" and 1 "fuck", during a scene with so much background noise I'm not convinced he didn't say "fine". Incredible. I imagine the filmmakers wouldn't have minded if this got an R - this movie would be of interest to few adults but virtually no teenagers or children - but this blows my mind. Contrary to many people's beliefs, I think film ratings have (gross generalization) gotten more tightassed over the past ten, twenty years...my only proofs of this are individual examples, but they are striking. I'm still waiting for a PG-13 movie that got away with more than Dreamscape did twenty-one years ago. BACK TO THE P's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE