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I keep hearing people mention Primer, but really I don't know anything specific other than it's about time travel, it's very hard to follow, and apparently it won some awards at Sundance. Oh and the full title is apparently Primer: What Happens If It Actually Works? So... I'm expecting this to be ASTOUNDINGLY pretentious. Also someone doesn't know the rules for capitalizing titles. Either the people who made this movie or Netflix. Anyway, to start off with we have some nerds who don't look particularly charismatic discussing business plans in, I guess, someone's mom's kitchen. They're stuffing a lot of stuff in envelopes, someone seems to have a new fridge, and oh hey, dial-up modem! Is this movie secretly old enough for it not to be crazy weird to hear a dial-up modem? Nope, 2005.
We've... actually go a lot of engineering talk here. Seriously, we're pretty much starting off with 5 solid minutes of people talking about cooling systems and the conductivity of materials. And now they're cannibalizing old cars and refrigerators to get copper tubing and a catalytic converter. You know, most movies where someone makes a time machine, they just skip straight to where they just finished building their time machine. Not this movie though. This is... seriously a lot of freaking time being spent showing how hobbyist engineers go about constructing and testing things without wasting a lot of money. Of course, all the nerd points they score for doing that get cancelled out since honestly I'm pretty sure they're going into so much detail you could reconstruct this whole thing and then watch as it fails to really do anything. Incidentally I expect it's eventually going to get really nasty trying to convey who's doing what later because... these characters don't really have anything setting them apart, and don't toss names around much. We've got.. scrawny vaguely douchey nerdy guy in a work shirt and tie A, and scrawny vaguely douchey nerdy guy in a work shirt and tie B.. and every so often a C and D wander in too.
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OK, we're 20 minutes in here and there's still no plot. This is just like... the world's longest Building A Thing montage. I'm not exaggerating, I checked the clock, it's over 20 minutes in now. The plot still has not started. OK, I think I've got the name issue sorted out. These two main guys we have here? I'm going to call the dark haired guy who seems to be more of the main character Peter, the blond guy who seems to be doing more of the work will be Ray, the guy we periodically hop in on can be Egon, and that other guy who's sometimes around and doesn't seem to be relevant to anything gets to be Winston. Oh and... still no real plot here. We've finished making our computer case full of Science and have been sticking stuff in it for a while, with people GRADUALLY coming around to the notion that they have built a time machine with proper scientific rigor. Thrill as our heroes make repeated tests, taking detailed notes and verifying their results with independent testing by a third party! Be astounded as the second they seem to have something they start drooling over the prospect of publishing a paper on it! I'm not kidding by the way. We're past the 30 minute mark and it's still all just solid rigorous science. Also, it's never a good sign when you're aware of how much time has elapsed watching a movie.
Now they're doing the dishes, here's token female character wandering through. Seriously, is someone's wife? Girlfriend? Mom? Sister? I don't think anyone's talked to her or anything. For all I know it's the director's wife, she's not even in the movie, and she's just grabbing stuff out of the fridge trying not to interupt their little movie. But oh hey! Is there finally plot starting? Oh hey! I think it is! So here's the deal. The time machine let's you go from when it's starting up to when it's running down or vice versa. So being properly science minded nerds, they're testing this out. Ray books a hotel room, drops a spare car off, and leaves it running for a couple days, gets in, heads out, just spends the whole time reading books and playing solitaire and otherwise actively avoiding stepping on any butterflies, then relates the whole thing in exact detail to Peter. Then they decide to try and do the whole stock market prediction deal with it. By the way this movie has a SUPER GRAINY filter going on for no particular reason at all times. Anyway, Ray is really bothered by how they don't know what the company they're investing in actually does.
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And... now we're back to fretting about paradoxes. A lot. This entire movie is just these two muttering an endless meandering nerdy conversation. Oh and another thing that sucks with the time travel is that apparently it's basically just time moving backwards for you while you're in the rather radiated storage unit, sealed into your little shielded safety box. So... they end up taking sleeping pills and looking at the clock constantly. Much like I am doing. 40 minutes in. Also Peter's ear is spontaneously bleeding, presumably because he keeps getting out of the safety chamber too early. And now here's him accidentally bringing his cell phone on a trip to the past. They're still just spending several hours a day sitting in a hotel room with the phone unplugged and the door locked avoiding paradoxes and just doing gambling cheats. Anyway, now they're really freaking out and trying to determine what happens if two cell phones have the same number, whether they both ring or what.
Now they're finally willing to test the whole paradox angle. Ray got woken up in the middle of the night by a car alarm, so they decide to use the time travel activation they had prepared for stock trading and use it to guard the car, keeping the alarm from going off, keeping them from deciding to go back and prevent it, and just kinda see what happens. Doing so, they see some guy Ray saw earlier that day, and... yeah, things are officially starting to get all hard to follow. I could explain all this but I can't do so while watching for future developments. Short version is, something got all paradoxed up. However, Ray, out of paranoia, had the forethought to have set up a second time machine for emergencies which has been running for, really, the bulk of the movie's running time. Which I guess is nice to have, but seriously guys. Bill and Ted got this all figured out with no problems, and they're total idiots. All you need to do is follow notes you leave yourself then write them later and it all works out.
And now things are slipping into pretentious mode. Oh, OK, someone DID work out how to do this properly. Apparently we DON'T have paradox free time travel going on though. We have two(?) alternate Peters recording the events of their days and handing them off to the other in some crazy recursive loop to pretty much get everything right. They seem to be having some medical problems developing though from all this groundhog day-ing. So yeah, this is starting to get kind of interesting. You know what would be better though? If we didn't have such a long frelling set-up, and tried to make likable distinct characters and... oh hey it's over? OK yeah, things get kinda headachey and paradoxy for a while and eventually the main characters just go "%@#$ it" and use a time machine inside a time machine sorta deal to cheat their way back to the very beginning of the movie, sabotage the version of the time machine they find being built there until those versions of them give up on the whole idea, and then just go into hiding all weird and paranoid and... apparently earn a nice living off the gambling thing they were originally doing without causing new paradoxes for themselves, because really, this thing just ended in EXTREMELY abrupt fashion. But yeah. Needs likable characters and pacing and... some kind of actual story would be nice too. I like the time-goes-backwards-inside machine angle where you can only make trips from the relatively distant future to the immediate future and have to carefully plan them out concept though. I can't particularly recall that getting done with any other time travel stories. A similar variation going forward though, sure.
