I left the auditorium after viewing Shane Carruth's Primer hungry for explanations of some plot points—this from someone who thought the narratives of Memento and The Big Sleep were comprehensible. (Spoilers ahead.)

Two engineers, Aaron and Abe, as a skunkworks project in Aaron's garage, build a tabletop device that does...what? Well, it appears to have the property that an object placed in it follows two parallel paths in time. Imagine Schrödinger's cat, not only alive but meeting itself coming out of the box.

When Abe builds a bigger version of the machine and houses it in a walk-in self-storage unit, the two are soon riding their own double loops in space-time (and making a killing in the stock market, naturally). But a gentle disturbance of the system, and the inevitable wrinkles in causality, and Aaron and Abe are trapped in a dangerous Silicon Valley replay of Groundhog Day. (With much less humor, alas. An exception: Aaron says, after one of his trips, "These 36-hour days are killing me.")

There's a nifty short scene with Abe, punctuated with micro-flash-forwards and -backs, that anticipates the temporal mayhem. And Carruth's dialog is dead on. These are real engineers talking a sort of quantitative Mamet-speak, living in a culture where cannibalizing your car's catalytic converter for a few grams of experimental platinum (palladium?) is accepted, where venture capitalists are hated, and at the same time fawned over.

Carruth's piano underscoring some of his early scenes is too pushy, and informational dialogue is sometimes mumbled. And there's that problem of explaining what the hell is going on, which he seems to give up on about 20 minutes from the end of the film. Why does Aaron's ear bleed? Why are the doubles unable to wield a pencil, but are sound on a loco-motor-cognition basis? And what happened to Granger? Maybe the promotional site has the answers.

posted: 10:50:39 PM