Review: Primer

The film mixes the straight, middle-American white male angst of In the Company of Men with the sci-fi trappings of Pi.

Primer
Photo: THINKFilm

Winner of the grand prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Primer mixes the straight, middle-American white male angst of Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men with the sci-fi trappings of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. This isn’t a good thing. Writer-director Shane Carruth stars as Aaron, who, along with his fellow white-collar buddy Abe (David Sullivan), creates a homemade time machine in a U-Haul storage facility. You’ve seen Back to the Future, and so has Carruth: Doubles of characters soon start appearing, continuums get knocked out of whack, and much technobabble is spouted. All that’s missing is the doctor with the shock-white hair screaming about flux capacitors. In all the narrative steals are potentially profound statements about scientific responsibility and human interaction, but this is clearly a calling-card project, made not from a passionate desire to create, but out of the misguided let’s-put-on-a-show mentality that afflicts many a pretender to cinema’s throne. In other words, Primer is perfect Sundance material, its anonymous actors and Sprint-commercial mise-en-scène masked in the guise of independence, all the while secretly and shamelessly chomping at Hollywood’s dangling dollar signs.

Score: 
 Cast: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya, Carrie Crawford, Jay Butler  Director: Shane Carruth  Screenwriter: Shane Carruth  Distributor: THINKFilm  Running Time: 77 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2004  Buy: Video

Keith Uhlich

Keith Uhlich's writing has been published in The Hollywood Reporter, BBC, and Reverse Shot, among other publications. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.

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