Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

For reasons I’m not sure I can fully explain — or even understand – Primer is one of the most unsettling movies I’ve ever seen.  Like the most important works of science fiction, it eschews drama for ideas, or an idea, in this case time travel.  Here is why this is great science fiction:

Compare Primer to Back to the Future.  Back to the Future is a fantastic movie; it’s a classic adventure, fun and heartwarming and flashy and entertaining, which dances around the concept of time travel with faux-concern about disrupting the space-time continuum.  Doc Brown’s eyes bug out whenever Marty tries to change the future, but ultimately this issue is dismissed and relegated to something that concerns only these characters.  Recreate the past or your whole family will slowly disappear from a photograph, culminating in the erasure of your birth!  Back to the Future is Marty’s story, and the “right” thing to do in any situation regarding time muckery is to make sure everything turns out well for Marty.  Everyone goes home happy.

In Part II, you’ve got the evil Biff who uses knowledge of the future to get rich, rule the world, blah blah.  He’s a comical villain, his ancestor was a villain, his kids will be villains.  There’s destiny at work, here, and the grand design allows for the underdog McFlys and the mean old Tannens to be at odds forever, which makes for fun call-backs in the world of cinema.  What it doesn’t do is provide any sort of genuine questions of how time travel would affect real people.  And that’s fine — it doesn’t have to.

Primer does.  We see two men — two good men, kind and hard-working and smart — run aground the rocky morality of time travel.  We first see them labor, as scientists, to understand what they have created, and the implications of it.  We see them take great pains to avoid anything dangerous beyond their understanding — to prevent any sort of possible paradox, in case such an event may irrevocably damage their lives and the lives of others.  And when, inevitably, they begin to make meticulous changes to the future, we see the damage done to their own friendship.

Primer is certainly no cheeky adventure in a badass flying car, and even the inevitable destruction of the DeLorean does little to make a real case for the moral implications of time travel.  In Primer, we see the implications of their actions eat at the characters from within, just as the effects of their device eat at them from without.  In the end, the narrative becomes almost impossibly complicated — and it starts out pretty damn hard to follow.  But following the exact series of events isn’t really necessary.  It’s not the point.  Knowing that these men are dealing with forces outside of their own understanding, and seeing how power weighs on them is what makes this great sci-fi.  And, as I mentioned at the beginning, seeing what actions such believable, rational people will inevitably take is seriously unsettling.  Primer weighs heavy on the conscience.

A rational movie about time travel?  Yup, turns out it is possible after all.