Primer

This isn’t so much of a review as it is a mind cleanse. After wasting two hours of my life last week watching The Room when I could have been playing Hearthstone, I decided to focus this week’s Way Too Late review on one of the best independent movies of the last decade: Primer. (Hopefully calling Primer one of the best movies ever won’t provoke the kind of Twitter backlash my comments about The Room did last week.) I first watched Primer back in 2012. Much like The Room, I’d heard Primer mentioned on Reddit and initially watched it to see what all the hype was about. Unlike The Room, Primer blew me away, so it was the perfect remedy for a bad movie.

Primer’s storyline is convoluted by design, requiring a few rematches to keep all the timelines straight. At its heart, Primer is the story of two friends: Abe and Aaron. Primer follows their story as the two men accidentally invent a time-travel machine. While they initially travel back in time for innocuous purposes, their intentions become less noble over time, which tests their friendship. Filmed in Dallas on a $7,000 budget (or 0.12% what it cost to make The Room), Primer looks infinitely more polished than its fellow indie brethren. Perhaps it’s because Shame Carruth wrote a smart script, meticulously storyboarded each shot, and didn’t waste his budget buying two sets of cameras.

Primer hits all my great filmmaking buttons. It’s compact, clocking in at a scant 77 minutes, but the story doesn’t plod or drag at all. The movie assumes a level of intelligence from its audience, dropping us into the film without any preamble and only a small of amount of exposition. Certain plot points are never explained, but they don’t need to be. This is a film that challenges you to discover its depths. And people have done just that: see this chart for an explanation of all the timelines shown throughout the movie.

Perhaps it isn’t fair to judge Primer and The Room side-by-side, but I think there are some interesting parallels. Shane Carruth and Tommy Wiseau are at their core both filmmakers, trying to make their mark in film. Neither came from a film background. Shane Carruth was a software engineer, while Tommy Wiseau…imported Korean leather jackets? They’re both trying to tell engaging stories, and both are passionate about having creative control over their films. The end result, however, is vastly different. Primer looks better than sci-fi movies ten times its budget, while The Room looks like General Hospital B-reel footage. Neither film can be truly appreciated on a single watch, although Primer needs a rematch to better understand the plot, while one watches and re-watches The Room in order to appreciate how bad it is.

What’s interesting is that both movies have become bona fide cult classics, albeit for different reasons. Shane Carruth is feted as an intelligent filmmaker, while Tommy Wiseau’s movie is being laughed at, a la Rocky Horror Picture Show. Critical acclaim or popular acclaim? What constitutes success? I’d like The Room better if I knew that Tommy Wiseau was purposefully trying to make a bad movie, which he wasn’t. He just threw a lot of money at his passion project, proving that money can’t buy talent. Is accidental success still success? It might be. After all, The Room is so bad I can’t stop thinking about it, a week later. Primer, on the other hand, succeeds on purpose, and so I’d argue is the bigger success of the two.

Whatever the filmmakers’ intentions, their movies now serve two very different purposes. If you’re in the mood for a good chuckle, buy some flowers, grab your spoons and fire up The Room. If, on the other hand, you enjoy movies that engage your brain instead of killing it, watch Primer.

tl;drs

Quick summary: Primer is one of the smartest time-travel movies you’ll ever see and 100 times smarter than The Room.

Too many writers? Nope. Shane Carruth wrote the whole thing when he wasn’t acting, directing, producing, editing, or composing the soundtrack. (You know who didn’t write Primer? Tommy Wiseau.)

Recommended if you like: Indie movies that look big budget. Movies that are way more enjoyable than The Room.

Better than I expected? At 77 minutes, this movie flies by. You can watch it and still make the most of your weekend. This compares to The Room, which is 99 minutes, but feels like 3 hours.

Worse than I hoped? There are a few sound issues (especially when Aaron and Abe are outside) where the limited budget shows through. You know what though? Still bette than The Room.

Would it work better in a different medium? I’d be curious to see Primer as a comic book. And if The Room can be made into a video game, why not Primer?

Verdict: This is what to watch after you’ve just seen a crappy movie and want your faith in film restored. (And by crappy movie…I mean The Room.)

Related Reading: The relevant xkcd Wikipedia article Cliff’s Notes on the plot IMDB entry