Have you seen Momento?If so, do you remember how confusing that film was throughout much of its run and how you probably watched it a couple of times (if you had it on video or DVD) before you could really figure out what was happenning?
Well, the same kind of feeling comes from the movie Primer, but I'm only one viewing in at this point.
I think I know what happened, but I'm not entirely sure I could explain each twist and turn to you.
The basic set-up is that four engineers are working on a project in one of their garages after work hours. It's nothing special - making and selling circuit boards or something. Two of the guys have a separate project in the same garage, however, that just might be the biggest invention/discovery that mankind has ever worked out. It allows them to alter the past and the future with all but absolute knowledge.
And if they could only trust the other to not use it alone, they'd be okay...which is, of course, where the idyllic plotline goes haywire.
It's a quick film - seventy-seven minutes according to the DVD back (with supposedly only eighty minutes of film actually shot for the movie - so you won't be investing too much even if it doesn't strike your fancy, and I'll warn you that the initial parts of the movie are a little hard to follow because of the filmmaker's style of recording the main characters, but don't sweat that. The opening stuff is just the character intro, and once the plot gets moving along in earnest, things are a little easier to follow.
The science is atrocious and glossed over, but that's cool because the movie is really about the extremes to which two friends would go to make sure that their world is as perfect as they want it to be. Not necessarily as perfect as the two want it to be, but each making decisions to make sure the world is their own, personal version of perfection.
And it takes some following to get what's being done through each cross and double cross, but Primer is well worth trying to figure it all out.
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