The Unseen Movie Review

Primer

This ultra-low-budget indy flick, made for just $7,000, is one of those rare breakthrough movies from a first-time writer/director/actor which genuinely deserves the rave reviews and lavish praise. Like Darren Aronofski’s Pi or Christopher Nolan’s Memento, this is a wonderfully complex and intelligent film with a fascinating and – all too rare these days – original premise. It came out of nowhere last year to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, yet thanks to its indy roots has taken a while to get distribution on this side of the pond. It’s well worth trying to catch.

Yet the praise has not been unanimous. Some critics have pointed to the lack of acting ability of the film’s mastermind, Shane Carruth, while others have attacked its sheer complexity. This is a little unfair, considering not only the glossy job he has managed to pull off with so few resources but also the fact that these same critics so often complain about the lack of intellectual stimulation in modern movies. This has intellect in spades.

The central premise – two friends accidentally invent a time machine and start working out ways to put it to their advantage – doesn’t sound anything special. There have been countless time travel movies, some more successful than others. The subject is an endlessly intriguing one, with so many potential paradoxes and pitfalls that rare is the movie that takes it on without a few trips along the way. Back to the Future may be great fun, and its sequels truly cunning in their interconnected backtracking, but in places the logic still fell down. Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys admirably managed to keep tabs on all the problems, but his Time Bandits – deliberately – was rather more nonsensical.

Does the interweaving plot here make sense? Do all the strands add up? It’s fairly tricky to tell after just one viewing, but Carruth has repeatedly insisted that, if you pay close enough attention, it does.

This is the major concern for some critics – Carruth has done such a good job of providing an intelligent, understated exploration of the ever-increasing pitfalls of time travel that it’s well-nigh impossible to keep tabs on all the various plot strands. With his background in mathematics and engineering it is entirely possible that Carruth has got all this worked out somewhere in a vast spider chart as the friendships splinter, the ability to travel back in time is misused, and the dangers of bumping into alternate versions of oneself become clear.

For an audience viewing for the first time, however, much of what is going on is – deliberately – baffling. You will need to see this film at least twice to work out what’s going on, and probably more if you really want to unravel the details and work out whether it genuinely makes sense. But despite the criticisms, despite the occasionally amateurish acting, the likelihood is you’ll want to.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 4:15 AM