Over the past few months, I've accrued a large list in my Netflix Instant Queue. I really dislike clutter (and I really like watching movies), so I'll be making the effort to clean it out and watch what's in there. It's an eclectic group, so I hope to have fun with it, and improve my writing and criticism in the process. Except for one exception, I have not seen any of these movies, so this should prove to be an adventure.
The first movie I picked was Primer, a 2004 independent movie produced, directed and written by Shane Carruth. The movie had a budget of $7,000. It is also the most confused I have ever been in a movie.
The movie is about time travel. Now, with time travel being so prominent in science fiction, I felt confident that I would be able to grasp this film pretty easily. I've watched all the seasons of LOST (I've watched season 5 twice, which is the time travel-heavy one), I loved Looper, and I've rolled my eyes at the Time-Turner in Harry Potter. Hell, I've even read 3/4's of From Eternity to Here, a fantastic book about the nature of time by Sean Carroll, a physics professor at Cal Tech.
I had no idea what happened in this movie.
That's a lie. I drifted in and out of the various timelines that are set up. The pieces are accessible. It's the assembly that is complicated. The premise of the plot is this: two scientists discover that they can make close looped timelines through which they can manipulate events in time. They can store "doubles" of themselves in the box (the time machine) which move forward, then backward in time at a much more rapid rate than they do. As can be imagined, this gets convoluted. The doubles interact with the originals in fascinating, bewildering ways.
The film, due to its low budget, sinks down into a common-man's science that adds to its integrity-- two stressed-out scientists accidentally discovering time travel in a garage is not a bad guess to how this will happen in real life. The characters speak like scientists speak-- meaning that I didn't understand what was going on 80% of the time they were speaking. If anything, this is the film's flaw-- it doesn't provide any handrail. I felt like I did in Calculus at about minute 40 when the professor had lost me at minute 15. This would derail any interest I had in the movie if the premise wasn't so intriguing. I had never seen time travel tackled in this way before-- the creation of the double is something that I still don't fully understand, but it was totally novel to me, and it may actually inspire me to read some scientific articles.
This is why the film works: it presents its material in a manner that, even though you don't understand, you desperately want to. Time is something that's just there for most of us. I had never really thought all that much about what it meant to be moving through time before reading Carroll's book. Even thought I understood very little of what he said, it shifted my views of the universe. This film does that. It's an immense challenge, but I will definitely revisit it with the help of charts and timelines to dissect the 4 other movies enclosed within.
The movie also presents some weighty themes of obsession and human daring. I won't go too much into detail in order to avoid spoilers in any timeline, but the philosophical points of the film are just as strong as its scientific ones.
I don't know how to review this film. It's a textbook, shoestring indie masterpiece, and mindwarp all in one. Its strong story pulls the viewer along while the time travel blindfolds it and beats it over the head with a baseball bat.
Final Grade: A-
Next on GNP2013 (there's a terrible acronym for you): Raising Arizona. Considering that I am from Arizona, I will be overly critical about this film. Just kidding, it's the Coens.
No comments:
Post a Comment