Out of desperation to see something new and original, I decided to throw Sundance Film Festival Award-Winner Primer to the top of my Netflix qeue. Lauded for being a stunner of a sci-fi thriller about time travel made on a $7,000 budget, I couldn’t pass it up.

It’s brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that it fails on a number of levels to be accessible even to nerds like me. Like any time-travel movie worth its weight in flux capacitors, this film focuses on the problems you get whilst screwing with the temporal continuum. The technical jargon comes on about as hard and fast as Mike Tyson’s punches used to, and if you spend too long sitting there dazed and confused the quick-moving dialogue will sneak past you and knock you right out of the plot. Keep your finger on the “What did he say?” button (a.k.a. “rewind”) on this one.  You’ll be needing it. Often.

Then again, if you’re familiar with superconducting ceramic loops, electromagnetic fields, and the problems a bunch of guys working on them in the garage might have with quenching, you’ll be a couple steps ahead of the game until the time/space paradoxes kick in.

All that said, the acting is good, the plot is intelligent (to a fault) and the characters are likeable. It’s suspenseful because it’s character-driven, and the threats posed by the unknown, untested and largely unseen technology had me sitting on the edge of my seat despite the lack of strong visual cues that something would go wrong. What made it work, for me, was that it felt pretty darn real.

There’s no doubt that at times, Primer screams “INDEPENDENT FILM”. The dialogue is too wordy and at times cross talk and wooden delivery can throw you out of the narrative. The night scenes are underexposed, leaving visual artifacts on screen that you would never see in a studio film, but if it makes you think about the amateurs working the cameras, it also adds a level of realism that glossy over-produced movies don’t. But considering that one guy wrote, directed, acted as lead, and did all post-production (including the score) on his home computer makes this one hell of a testament to power the digital age puts at our fingertips. Add to that the fact that the savant who made this 78-minute powerhouse, 31-year old Shane Carruth, had never before directed anything, and the whole package is impressive just for the fact that it exists, and has risen to a level of consciousness that warrants major studio distribution.

I’ll include the trailer here, but it’s rubbish. It gives you no real sense of what the movie is about, but does expose a bit of the film’s visual style. If you can find a copy and you like hard sci-fi, even if it’s confusing as hell, it’s worth a rent. For those of you who lament the lack of clean films, there’s also no smut, and I didn’t notice the use of any profanity (though maybe I was too engrossed to pick up on it.)

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