Well this is sort of a Sunday Night Movie post. You see I did not finish this film and I have returned it to Netflix unfinished.

I heard about Primer at a couple of SF cons where people said good things about this odd little time travel film. It’s about a couple of engineers who accidentally build a time machine in their garage. (apparently they were going for anti-gravity so it’s not like they aim small anyway.)

This film is short, just 77 minutes long and I think the filmmakers have disdain for the three act structure of narrative: Establishment, Conflict, Resolution. I watched more than half of the film, about 40 minutes, and so far no hint of conflict and what establishment there was mainly concerned their engineer speak. It was literally like 40 min of Star Trek techonobabble and zero character. I mean that. When I stopped the disc and went to bed last night I could not name the characters, I could not tell you anything about their personality or natures beyond they were engineers and one was apparently married. (Or living together with his GF and their daughter.) I could not say if he loved his wife, if it was a loveless marriage, if he adored her or had grown bored, nothing. As far as I could tell you take one of the pair and have them switch lines with the other and it would make not one iota of difference.

I stopped just after they started traveling in time to make money on the stock market. Really, once they started time traveling my interest grew less. For me to care about what happened I need to care about them and they weren’t people to me, they were walking talking exposition.

Well that’s my opinion and I am sticking to it.