Oh what a little gumption can do. Shane Carruth wrote, directed, produced and starred in this 2004 film that chronicles two tech geeks' experiments with time travel. His total budget? $7,000. What's that you say? A film about time travel for only $7,000? Are the special effects cheesy as hell? How many more rhetorical questions will I ask in this post? (My journalism professors are turning in their proverbial graves.)
Well, there are no special effects. No, ladies and gentlemen, this movie doesn't rely on CGI to move its storyline along. It relies on things like a great story line, excellent acting and some superb editing (how about those positive adjectives).
Primer follows two engineers who are trying to build a zero gravity device when they realize they've accidentally built a time machine. The film moves quickly, with the characters talking about things the audience probably doesn't understand (unless they are engineers) without stopping to explain. They talk in quick mutters, referring to past events that we don't know about and to people we have never met. This makes the film so believable, so real to life, that you wonder if it is a documentary (the lazy cam filming adds to the effect). It is just two engineers trying to figure out what they've built and how to control it. There is no made up metal or electrical force or giant gizmo that no one could ever create to serve as the time portal. It's just a box. Something so simple yet so believable that you don't even miss the special effects, in fact, you don't even wonder where they are.
The story twists in and out and if you aren't paying attention it is easy to get lost, but that is the fun in it. You are supposed to be lost, the main characters are too. The plot works around theories of time travel, and the consequences of it, in a realistic manner. Well, as realistic as I can imagine time travel to be.
I wanted to say that before Primer I didn't think I had seen a truly remarkable film about time travel. But then I did some research and found some great time travel movies, like Flight of the Navigator, 12 Monkeys, Terminator (how could I forget) and the Philadelphia Expirement. These were all great time travel movies, but Primer stands out among them and proves that low budget can mean very high quality. Maybe that's the line you should use on the corner, Anthony.
-Dabs
