Movie Review #1: Primer

There's a guy at my church named Joe. He's a great guy. Not just because he's a Colorado Avalanche fan. Not just that he's married to a wonderful lady named Cindy. But also because he loves movies. Not just any movie, mind you. But good movies. For example, Crash = good movie. Pearl Harbor = cruddy movie. (Although I still haven't heard his verdict on a movie I let him borrow, one I like a lot called Pi.)

Anyway, I've seen a lot of answered prayers lately, which is a good thing. A real good thing. One of my prayers that I've been praying is that I would find someone else with a passion for good movies, movies that make you think, movies that cause your entire day or even week to be disrupted because you're still thinking about the doggone thing. Joe and I talked a week or two ago that it would be cool to get a movie discussion group going sometime in the near future. I like the idea a lot. We all watch the same movie, one of us comes up with some questions, and we talk about the movie. In the meantime (and perhaps even after this group starts up), I thought I would do some short movie reviews every once in awhile as I come across good, no great movies.

So - today is my first one.

Primer is a movie that I picked up about four months ago, but didn't watch it in its entirety the first time. The main reason why is that the sound editing in the movie is not that great. Of course, if you consider that this movie was made for $7,000 - yet still won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, you let little irritations like sound editing slip. But because I couldn't hear it very well the first time on my T.V. downstairs, I didn't really get into it. So I picked it up again this week and this time I watched it on my laptop with headphones. This is how I like to watch my movies now - yes, I'm weird. It's amazing, though, what you pick up when you listen to a movie with headphones. It makes it a lot easier to pick up the plot and understand the dialogue.

Anyway, this movie is very good. It takes a familiar premise to movies - time travel - but rather than dealing so much with what takes place during the time travel (as the very cruddy movie Timeline did), or dealing with how the "time traveling device" works - this movie mostly deals with the consequences that take place when two guys react in completely different ways when this time travel is discovered. It's a "heady" movie, believe me - I still don't really understand how they really discovered a way to travel back in time. But I like the approach, the characters are good, and again - the fact that this movie was made for only $7,000 makes me hopeful for the future of movies. This kind of movie proves that you don't need a $100 million dollar budget to do a good movie about science-fiction related topics.

Time travel can be really cheesy in movies. This movie deals with this potentially cheesy subject in a great way: rather than the ability to magically transport back seven thousand years in the past or forward into the future - you can only travel back as long as the time that you spend in the machine. Once they have that figured out, there's another problem. If you travel back to that morning, you must have planned the day out in such a way that you don't run into yourself during that day. It also deals well with the so-called "grandfather problem" of time travel: if I go back and kill my grandfather, does that mean that I am not born in the future, so then I can't really kill my grandfather?

At first, these guys use this time travel to make money on the stock market. But then they start thinking about other things they want, or people they want to get back at: after all, if it doesn't work out, they can always go back and change it again. And that's when problems arise. These guys can swear themselves to secrecy, that they won't tell anyone else - but what if they go back in time, and their original selves find out about this time travel idea - what's to prevent them to tell anyone?

Yes, I know - it's heady stuff. It comes to an incredibly climactic ending that I had to rewind a couple of times just to understand what was going on.

Primer is a great movie - one that not everyone will like (the guy at Blockbuster told me he didn't like it because "nothing really happens in the first hour.") A lot happens in the first hour. I guess he meant that no one dies or goes postal or something. Anyway, I give Primer 3 1/2 flux capacitors out of 4.