Primer - 2004 - Shane Carruth

Primer is the kind of sci-fi movie that you would expect form Stanley Kubrick or Andrei Tarkovsky.

The story is not easy to follow but if you pay attention most of the information that you need is provided. It starts out with four friends that are trying to get thier fledgeling tech company off the ground. The guys are all engineers and they are trying to come up with an idea that will get them venture capital to grow the company. Aaron(Shane Carruth) and Abe(David Sullivan decide to pursue one idea while letting the other two due thier own thing. Aaron and Abe end up creating 'the box' and then they start locking the others out of the garage/workshop because they do not want anyone to know what have come up with until they can figure out what exactly the box does and what they can use it for. Abe is ostensively the first preson to discover what the box does and how it is working. The box is a time machine that more or less lets you go back to the point it is turned on. Abe tells Aaron that he has made a bigger box and that he has tried it out. Form this point we see multiple iterations of Abe and Aaron as they travel back in time in order to make money playing the stock market. Thing go wrong along the way and in the end we get a scene in a Hollywood movie would lead into a sequel.

At a cost of reportedly a little over seven thousand dollars, Primer is often compared to Darren Aronofsky's 1998 film Pi. While both films are low budget sci-fi, Shane Carruth is a former engineer and he gives the film a realism that Aronofsky would never attempt. The characters are the type of people that you probably know and they look and act like normal everyday people. The plot is interesting enough to merit watching a few times, but there are a couple of holes that are never quit resolved.

I hope that Shane Carruth ends up making more films, but thus far this is his only work.
8/10