For those of you who have been suckered by this con-artist (because "Primer" was a rather clever con-job) and insist that additional views are mandatory to understand this supposedly maze-like plot, I say the following: movies aren't supposed to be like schoolwork that you have to go over several times before you get tested on it. Movies should be PRIMERily fun, extra viewings should be awarded to movies that succeed (to at least some extent) the first time around.
Shane uses the cheapest trick in the book: he makes the plot so impossible to follow that one never gets the chance to criticize it, i.e. to even notice the finer points of the staggering and inevitable illogic that would have been there.
Playing with time-travel, you're bound to hit dead ends and run into unsolvable paradoxes and contradictions. Time-travel movies are ALWAYS full of gaping logic holes, simply because time-travel itself is a no-win situation by its very definition. It's like an Escher drawing you can't get out of.
So the question begs itself, why would Shane decide on making the movie incomprehensible? Surely viewers would get upset and hate the movie, right? For one thing, he had no choice; either he was going to make the story easy to follow and that way almost anyone with half a brain-cell could see its huge holes in logic - or he could make it garbled hence "mysterious" and "aloof" hence "wow, this guy is soooo smart AND he's making art".
Secondly, he knew very well that the art-house crowd and sci-fi nerds would be watching this ultra-low-budget feast-wannabe - not the popcorn-munching fans of "Twilight" - knowing that this target audience would be too embarrassed to admit that they didn't understand the movie, hence why we have all these positive reviews from people too scared to admit to themselves that they'd just seen 73 minutes of confusing nonsense, let alone admit that to others. As a result, we have these pleading reviews that desperately try to eke out any semblance of dignity in having witnessed this pseudo-intellectual caviar dressing. (Which turns out to be just cheap dime-store ketchup.)
There is no acceptable reason why any filmmaker would not include the BASIC elements of a story, unless he had something shameful to hide. Shane wanted/needed to hide the movie's bundles of time-related illogic, so he resorted to mumbling, crappy editing, confusing direction even. Film-making is about telling stories, and if that most basic element is unsuccessfully conveyed then you're left with a turkey on your hands, and a director who indirectly admits to his own incompetence as a story-teller.
If Shane had made the story clearer we would have inevitably laughed at the many things that ended up totally unexplained (i.e. avoided), such as what happened with the army of doubles. All the tricky conundrums that are inevitable in time-travel stories have been avoided by turning the script into a bloody hazy mess.
I did have certain expectations, and gave up only around 20 minutes before the ending. I liked the set-up, I liked the non-moronic approach to a sci-fi story, I liked the fact that scientists finally weren't portrayed as infantile jokesters (Schreiber in "Sphere", to name but one out of many examples).
Unfortunately, Shane's decision to make the movie TOTALLY garbled (as opposed to half-garbled, which would have been acceptable) made me chuckle at the film's "conclusion". The last fifteen minutes are a series of barely related scenes, with very vague hints lurking here and there, incomplete facts, lousy semi-facts, headache-inducing editing (in the sense of "oh come on, let that other scene finish first!"), shadowy insinuations, and totally fake "science talk" posing as "explanation".
Almost nothing was explained. A few things were hinted at by giving us so little concrete information that Shaun enabled the sci-fi geeks and art-house putzes to play around with ideas, interpreting the movie in any way they please. But who are they kidding? Neither me nor Shane (the difference being that this situation suits him just fine).
It's a very simple formula, the foundation of so many meaningless Euro-trash dramas. If the viewer gets ALL the facts, as in an Agatha Christie flick, then there is nothing or almost nothing to mull over, and any place in the script where the writer might have failed becomes easy pickings for the more observant viewer, hence explaining everything is risky in the sense of exposing yourself totally, naked, warts and all. In "Primer", on the other hand, we have the other extreme: the viewer leaves with almost nothing at the end. It's like getting only 18 pieces out of a 250-piece puzzle to play around with, so what you inevitably end up doing (provided you're desperate to solve the puzzle instead of throwing it into the bin as you should) is to fill in the blanks yourself, using your imagination, and that is exactly what Shane's devious plan might very well have been. Or he just got lucky.
Add to that the oft-successful "hey this was made on a shoe-string budget by a very clever guy without corporate backing (hence he must be talented; strange logic) so this must be an ignored gem" marketing strategy. Now you've got a ball rolling, an avalanche of hype starts until the snow-ball is so fast and powerful that very few dare place themselves in its path.
"Primer" is so viewer-unfriendly that I couldn't even figure out who's Abe and who's Aaron! And you can bet that both names beginning with "A" is no coincidence either: Shaun worked at making this flick as confusing as possible - from every little angle that he could. He should be a politician, not a filmmaker: all vagueness and empty promises, hype, but nothing concrete.
Shane uses the cheapest trick in the book: he makes the plot so impossible to follow that one never gets the chance to criticize it, i.e. to even notice the finer points of the staggering and inevitable illogic that would have been there.
Playing with time-travel, you're bound to hit dead ends and run into unsolvable paradoxes and contradictions. Time-travel movies are ALWAYS full of gaping logic holes, simply because time-travel itself is a no-win situation by its very definition. It's like an Escher drawing you can't get out of.
So the question begs itself, why would Shane decide on making the movie incomprehensible? Surely viewers would get upset and hate the movie, right? For one thing, he had no choice; either he was going to make the story easy to follow and that way almost anyone with half a brain-cell could see its huge holes in logic - or he could make it garbled hence "mysterious" and "aloof" hence "wow, this guy is soooo smart AND he's making art".
Secondly, he knew very well that the art-house crowd and sci-fi nerds would be watching this ultra-low-budget feast-wannabe - not the popcorn-munching fans of "Twilight" - knowing that this target audience would be too embarrassed to admit that they didn't understand the movie, hence why we have all these positive reviews from people too scared to admit to themselves that they'd just seen 73 minutes of confusing nonsense, let alone admit that to others. As a result, we have these pleading reviews that desperately try to eke out any semblance of dignity in having witnessed this pseudo-intellectual caviar dressing. (Which turns out to be just cheap dime-store ketchup.)
There is no acceptable reason why any filmmaker would not include the BASIC elements of a story, unless he had something shameful to hide. Shane wanted/needed to hide the movie's bundles of time-related illogic, so he resorted to mumbling, crappy editing, confusing direction even. Film-making is about telling stories, and if that most basic element is unsuccessfully conveyed then you're left with a turkey on your hands, and a director who indirectly admits to his own incompetence as a story-teller.
If Shane had made the story clearer we would have inevitably laughed at the many things that ended up totally unexplained (i.e. avoided), such as what happened with the army of doubles. All the tricky conundrums that are inevitable in time-travel stories have been avoided by turning the script into a bloody hazy mess.
I did have certain expectations, and gave up only around 20 minutes before the ending. I liked the set-up, I liked the non-moronic approach to a sci-fi story, I liked the fact that scientists finally weren't portrayed as infantile jokesters (Schreiber in "Sphere", to name but one out of many examples).
Unfortunately, Shane's decision to make the movie TOTALLY garbled (as opposed to half-garbled, which would have been acceptable) made me chuckle at the film's "conclusion". The last fifteen minutes are a series of barely related scenes, with very vague hints lurking here and there, incomplete facts, lousy semi-facts, headache-inducing editing (in the sense of "oh come on, let that other scene finish first!"), shadowy insinuations, and totally fake "science talk" posing as "explanation".
Almost nothing was explained. A few things were hinted at by giving us so little concrete information that Shaun enabled the sci-fi geeks and art-house putzes to play around with ideas, interpreting the movie in any way they please. But who are they kidding? Neither me nor Shane (the difference being that this situation suits him just fine).
It's a very simple formula, the foundation of so many meaningless Euro-trash dramas. If the viewer gets ALL the facts, as in an Agatha Christie flick, then there is nothing or almost nothing to mull over, and any place in the script where the writer might have failed becomes easy pickings for the more observant viewer, hence explaining everything is risky in the sense of exposing yourself totally, naked, warts and all. In "Primer", on the other hand, we have the other extreme: the viewer leaves with almost nothing at the end. It's like getting only 18 pieces out of a 250-piece puzzle to play around with, so what you inevitably end up doing (provided you're desperate to solve the puzzle instead of throwing it into the bin as you should) is to fill in the blanks yourself, using your imagination, and that is exactly what Shane's devious plan might very well have been. Or he just got lucky.
Add to that the oft-successful "hey this was made on a shoe-string budget by a very clever guy without corporate backing (hence he must be talented; strange logic) so this must be an ignored gem" marketing strategy. Now you've got a ball rolling, an avalanche of hype starts until the snow-ball is so fast and powerful that very few dare place themselves in its path.
"Primer" is so viewer-unfriendly that I couldn't even figure out who's Abe and who's Aaron! And you can bet that both names beginning with "A" is no coincidence either: Shaun worked at making this flick as confusing as possible - from every little angle that he could. He should be a politician, not a filmmaker: all vagueness and empty promises, hype, but nothing concrete.