Cast: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya, Carrie Crawford
Director: Shane Carruth
Producer: Shane Carruth
Screenplay: Shane Carruth
Cinematography: Shane Carruth, Anand Upadhyaya
Music: Shane Carruth
U.S. Distributor: Thinkfilm Inc.
With his name plastered all over the credits in every capacity from actor to director to producer to screenwriter to editor to cinematographer to composer, there's little doubt that first-time filmmaker Shane Carruth is a Renaissance Man. Unfortunately, he has channeled all of his efforts into the modern-day equivalent of The Emperor's New Clothes. Primer was made on a shoestring budget ($7000 to be precise), and looks like it. It has all the hallmarks of an amateur production: questionable sound and picture quality, crude performances, and dubious editing. Nevertheless, those qualities didn't stop Primer from winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival during a year when Sundance was trying to shake its "commercial" reputation. (Primer's victory says as much about the prize as it does the prize-winner).
The reason why Primer's defenders like the film is because they don't understand it. There's an explanation for that, and it's not because the subject matter wades into deep or intellectually uncharted waters. The movie's screenplay is incomprehensible. It is deliberately, frustratingly obtuse. Carruth wants to confuse and confound his audience. The upside of this is that if no one can piece together the semblance of a coherent narrative, it's tough to point to plot holes. Primer is about time travel - in particular, it's about two engineers who accidentally invent a time machine, then start using it for personal gain, and begin to understand the dangers that can result from time travel paradoxes. Therefore, it is (at least in theory) a science fiction movie. But, because it has no mainstream appeal, it's an art house science fiction movie.
To me, one of Carruth's biggest mistakes (aside from the fragmented jigsaw puzzle of a screenplay) is his attempt to legitimize the film's "science" by employing all sorts of technical-sounding mumbo-jumbo. This kind of "technobabble" might fool viewers without a scientific and/or engineering background, but to anyone with the proper experience, significant chunks of the dialogue sound downright silly. (What makes this all the more confounding is that Carruth was an engineer before he got into movie-making, so he should know his stuff, and recognize that gobbledygook won't pass muster.) Meanwhile, all of the drawbacks of messing with the fourth dimension have already been presented in other, more compelling stories. That makes Primer seem like a recycled bag of gimmicks.
Some of these deficiencies might be forgivable if there were any characters in the film capable of provoking a more energetic reaction than a bored sigh. Primer's protagonists, Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), are uninteresting in the extreme. We don't care about them or their invention, and that turns the entire 78-minute motion picture into an uninvolving, clinical exercise. To further exacerbate matters, neither Carruth nor Sullivan is an accomplished thespian, and their wooden attempts to bring these characters to life are utterly unconvincing. I didn't for a moment believe I was watching real people in a credible situation. From the beginning, I was aware that Primer was a filmmaker's contrivance, and there wasn't a moment when I ceased to be aware that I was sitting in a theater.
Some have argued that Primer might start to make sense after a second or third viewing. That is, of course, a possibility, but this is not a movie I want to revisit to test that theory. Even if the story starts to come together, too many other flaws are being generously overlooked by the movie's boosters. Perhaps by the ninth or tenth viewing, Primer will impart some great truth about the nature of the universe, but I doubt it. From my perspective, this is just another sloppy, pretentious first movie by someone who wanted to have a cinematic calling card. I give Carruth a lot of credit - exactly as much as I give to the tailor who designed and stitched together the Emperor's suit.
© 2004 James Berardinelli