So I’d heard of Primer once or twice, but never actually knew what it was about. It starts off really slow, as a friend put it, it’s a couple of nerds arguing over a science project. Once the two main nerds figure out what they’ve created, then it starts to pick up.

After a few projects gone wrong, they stumble upon what they think at first is a perpetual energy machine. Soon they find that it’s so much more. When they put an item in the box (machine) it comes out with five years worth of mold on it, after only being in the box for five minutes. They try putting a watch in. Several watches to make sure. When they take it out of the box, significant time has passed on the watch, for only a few seconds that’s passed for them. The realize they’ve made a time machine.

It seems very interesting, and they do everything right when they build a bigger one to use on themselves. They spend the day far away in a hotel room until the evening, when they go to the machine, travel back to the morning, and spend the day in the city, playing the stoke markets like pros.

Things start going wrong when a cell phone rings. If there are two of you, one in a hotel room, and one in the city library, both with the same cell phone, who picks it up? From here it just gets confusing. Primer is one of those movies that isn’t very long, because you have to spend another hour and a half a week later to watch it again to understand it.

It does use a few good points though. Causality, making sure you, don’t end up at the same place at the same time as your future self, not being able to travel farther back in time than the existence of the machine itself. Paradoxes.

It’s a pretty low budget movie, and for a sci-fi, it’s pretty low action, but it’s a thinker, and definitely a good watch(s).

Either way, later.