ihavebeenfloated

This will be the first time, and probably not the last, that I’ve watched a movie and then wished I could go back in time and prevent myself from watching it. Why? The sheer amount of ideas and confusing paranoid emotions in Primer are enough to make my head, and my chest, ache. I sit here afterward, my head spinning, and when I try to stand up, I feel dizzy.

Honestly, I feel the best way to watch this movie is to view it with no knowledge of it’s subject matter aside from one simple miniature outline of the first twenty minutes of the film: Two small time entrepreneurs create a device that is far outside of their ability to comprehend and appropriately use. That’s it, really, and I don’t want to say more. (Except maybe that it involves time travel. And stuff.)

This movie works on so many levels. It’s shot in a sort of documentary feeling style, probably because the film was made for around $7,000 and it was necessity to shoot it sloppily, but it works well. Further than that, the conversations between characters feel like a documentary as well, and often in the beginning of the film you have people all talking in unison and it brings about a great annoyed feeling, as if you were there with them. The colors are a bit washed out, things are shot at weird angles or through windows, and the overall effect is this terrible since of foreboding and paranoia that really sets the movie off. I think, if it wasn’t for the style of the film, the story would fall relatively flat.

There’s a lot at work, here. It’s interesting to watch, and to figure out why, people go from simple greed to potentially throwing it all away from something that is apparently entirely consequential. There’s also a few “puzzles” to be solved, since by the end of the movie you’re more than likely going to end up confused more than anything. The movie is generally easy to understand up until the last fifteen minutes or so, when all hell breaks lose and things are shown in fragmented clips of time that are difficult to piece together unless you’re really paying close attention. I actually had to take notes.

All in all, a good film, if only for it’s ideas and the sheer style and feeling it carries with it. Also, good movie for films of time travel. Definitely shows how it would work more realistically than any other film, as far as I’m knowledgeable.