Primer (2004)
And you thought Tenet was hard to follow!
Presentation:
If you want a challenging narrative, this is likely as confusing as it gets. There has never been a more complex time travel movie including Tenet, which I’m sure was inspired by this. The thing is the film does give you all the pieces, but it’s too much and too dense to grasp on your first watch. Meanwhile Tenet is just intentionally obscure. Despite this indie film looking pretty dirty, it somehow adds to its appeal. I can’t think of another film that feels like this. There’s a ton of missed focus, grainy image quality, poor audio dubbing, monotone voices spoken with minimal explanation, the caveat being it’s actually decently shot. I’d describe the presentation feeling like a routine office meeting except you have no idea what they’re taking about. You’re sort of expected already be familiar with a lot of time travel and scientific theory and it doesn’t help that they don’t even try to use viewer friendly language. Like who the hell uses 7 decagrams for units? Everything about this experience is trippy, and though it is technically poorly explained and depicted, that’s part of the experience.
Story:
I’m not really going to bother with explaining the entire film, which I don’t think I even have space to write. The time traveling mechanics in this film are unique in that you can only go back in time to whenever you turn it on. This machine creates a time loop limited by when it was operating, meaning you can’t go back further than when it was created. This is crucial because if you can travel to a point before the machine is created, it will always lead to predestination since your current predicament will always be shaped by your time traveling future. Open loops are more interesting and this mechanic is also what allows the twist of the film to exist, which is the failsafe, a Time Machine that they bring into the Time Machine activated at its inception. How it all plays out is very convoluted and frankly poorly explained. It’s quite difficult to identify which Abe and Aaron we are watching at any given time. It’s a clever decision that Abe decides to lock themselves in a hotel to reduce complications. Basically in order to use the machine, you have to active it to create an end point for your future’s past. That’s why it is consistent to turn the machine on, isolate, then when you are certain yourself from the future is finished, you can leave this time line and the enter the machine to follow in their same footsteps.
This essentially forces a law of etiquette, so that if you cheat and don’t sequester, your future self won’t come out because you violated the rules hence violating your path. You wouldn’t intentionally enter the machine knowing your past is going to cheat you. It does leave a mind boggling loophole, which what if you turned the machine off while your double is inside? Because this is not a closed looped, you could technically kill your other timeline without consequence. However, my interpretation is that whenever a machine is active every choice becomes a probability and hence a closed loop. Any attempts to diverge shouldn’t be possible, because your future should already have come back to alter your events, making your divergence actually part of the loop. You would never choose to kill your future past self by turning off the machine, because if that was a possibility then you would be dead before you can even ponder this choice, killed off before you can consider killing your past in the same method, a paradoxical impossibility.
Analysis:
What I think one can take away from this film is that open time travel paradox has infinite permutations and will have a mathematic limit of chaos. Because if you can change the past, then with enough travels the change must eventually reach a point of chaos where one of your permutations will try to stop this from ever happening. What could go wrong, must go wrong given enough permutations as this is an open loop, which is more divergent and more chaotic.
Conclusion:
The runtime is 1h20m, but I think this is actually a 3h+ experience. What’s more likely, the reason everything is so quick is because they are presenting the film for your second watch, not the first. This may be one of the most ambitious budget indie films. CGI or body doubles would have been useful to communicate some ideas, but I think there’s charm in getting lost in this sci-fi web of chaos. This demands at least 2 viewings because you’ll miss one beat and your rhythm will be thrown off for the rest of the film. It’s quite clear from the first 5 minutes of this film you’re going to have to be paying 100% attention at all times. As frustrating as it is, it is still one of the most unique experiences in sci-fi.
Recommendations
And you thought Tenet was hard to follow!