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Anybody having any views on Primer? I watched it after reading about it on Kottke. Around the sametime a few days earlier I had watched Memento. And the contras
by areaMan 18y ago
Anybody having any views on Primer? I watched it after reading about it on Kottke. Around the sametime a few days earlier I had watched Memento. And the contrast was as clear as heaven and earth.
Memento was v.intellectually stimulating and if you watched it closely (maybe twice) everything was there in the movie itself to figure out the 'mindfuck' elements. The very minute details which you may still miss were clearly explained in some article online, so all in all it was a comprehensive experience. It made you feel good at the end of it because everything had an explanation.
Whereas Primer just seemed like a bad movie and maybe partially because it was low budget. Throughout the movie I just thought I couldn't clearly see what was there in the scene. Many scenes felt like there was no proper light or sound.(youtubeish). And the storyline seemed so out of whack, and I remember watching it thrice, and lurking on the official movie forums trying to figure out the timeline and 'mindfuck'ness of the movie, but it just seemed like the whole movie could sort of come together only if you could imagine that half the movie was not shown. There were so many timelines in forums, and all of them seemed to miss out on major plotlines, which they would explain with a handwave as "director is v.smart and intended it to be so and you could feel that's what he wanted to portray... it was just not shown on screen...blah blah". The director himself lurked out on forums and gave conflicting and deliberately confusing interviews at the time on indie media sites and honestly he never seemed to explain wtf was going on.
In the end instead of a real mindfuck movie (like Memento), to me it just felt like a bad movie, where nothing could be explained and everything was left half-finished. I am still open to be convinced otherwise though it seems unlikely.