Film Review

Primer is a film that proves a Sundance Grand Jury Prize is not indicative of a great film. Robert Redford may be one of the greatest actors of our time, but the Sundance Kid should stay away from recommending movies to an independent audience.

Primer, the directorial debut of Shane Carruth, lacks any narrative thread, but essentially is a story about four broke, thirtysomething engineers who create a mysterious box in their garage that defies scientific rationality and seems to give them inexplicable control over life.

Two members of the group, Aaron (Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), decide to probe what potential their creation might have: They explore the commercial possibilities of time-travel for a few hours each day, encounter dreadful mishaps in a Scooby Doo-esque fashion and finally, things end quite badly, with the audience, plot and characters in a state of sheer confusion.

The film is as difficult to watch as a Chem 17 lecture the night before midterms. Scientific hypothesizing and experimentation fill the arduous first 30 minutes of the film, while poorly delivered banter between friends growing progressively more suspicious of one another fill the next half hour. The grand climax of the dizzying film is a fast-paced non-linear sequence of frames and voiceover trying to explain what has just bored the audience for the past hour.

The dialogue is entirely meaningless to the development of the film, making it all the more unbearable to watch. The dull, tense conversation between the protagonists experimenting in their garage makes one wonder if Carruth has yet to leave his own parents’ garage to interact with the outside world.

Despite the initial outpouring of praise for this admittedly unique film, the average NOVA documentary from a high school physics class displays more character development. Primer may excite the lonely guys at MIT, but the film should reach no theatres beyond those at Kendall Square. In his attempt to make science sexy, Carruth just gives the audience a headache and turns them off.

Perhaps the kindest compliment that can be paid to the film is that it is a low-budget combination of Office Space, with its portrayal of bitter, down-on-their-luck workers and token Indian engineer, and The Matrix, with its obtuse scientific jargon, pseudo-philosophical questions and green-tinted lensing. Problematically, the film lacks the wit or visual appeal of either film.

Both Carruth’s debut filmmaking skills and the pretentious nature of the film are reflected in his heavy-handed camera work: Carruth includes at least one shot per scene of the two protagonists standing in a room with a rectangular figure dividing them. Could it be that this box of weird science might ultimately divide the comrades?

In one particularly amateurish scene, Carruth leaves a steady camera on a panorama of the garage, all four scientists toiling away within. As the garage door closes, it seems as if the scene is going to black out, but the audience is instead treated to a moment of over-indulgent symbolism as the camera zooms in to the garage door to show each scientist boxed into his own window. It seems is if the director wants to tell us that the happy band of science geeks are doomed from the start, but, one hopes, his terrible process of doing so will doom his own filmmaking career.

If Carruth proves anything with his film, it is that sci-fi movies dealing with the tenuous nature of the time-continuum need Christopher Lloyd. In addition to the Grand Prize, Robert Redford’s sad attempt at a cinema chateau also awarded the film a prize for the advancement of science and technology in film. If Primer deserves any prize, it is a Razzie award for the most nauseating and incomprehensible science fiction film ever created.