The Best Time-Travel Movie You've Never Heard of Is Also the Most F—ed Up

If you’ve ever watched Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, you know how mind-bending and headache-inducing sci-fi feels. Nolan’s spectacle meets WTF to bring this complicated film to life in an experience you have to watch more than once to make sense of it. Tenet was innovative upon release, but a similar groundbreaking sci-fi film preceded it many years earlier. With a vastly smaller budget, 2004’s Primer tested the audience with its complicated time-travel storytelling puzzle.

The early years of the millennium saw Shane Carruth direct, star, edit, and score his first film. One could say Carruth only had a camera, a dream, and a screenplay that went full tech-speak from minute one, and delivered Primer as the end product. The film was lauded at Sundance with the Grand Jury Prize, but its legacy as a game-changing sci-fi movie is its biggest award. Its cult status might not be known to all, so if you want to jump on this bandwagon, prepare to be amazed – and go WTF not once, but for the whole film instead.

‘Primer’ Places the Earth-Shattering Origin of Time Travel in a Modest Garage

Simple and reachable is how Primer portrays its time travel technology. With boxes built in a garage – made out of palladium from salvaged parts and copper tubing from refrigerators – Aaron (Carruth himself) and Abe (David Sullivan) achieve this discovery that will alter the human race. While the device seems simple, Aaron and Abe’s knowledge and technical jargon aren’t. The development of their time travel device is very grounded in reality. The mix of a simple machine backed by their technical expertise makes their path to success complicated but frighteningly realistic.

Primer makes Aaron and Abe regular Joes with mild expectations. These 9-to-5 workers are just trying to hit the jackpot, working on their experiments during their limited free time. They’re the kind of people that have to juggle their jobs and their side gigs to keep the food on the table, and they treat themselves to steak to celebrate their success – basically, they’re us. Thus, their accidental discovery of time-travel technology raises the question of whether it resulted from fate or free will. Whatever the answer may be, free will takes the spotlight, as both start to experience a detrimental personal toll.

‘Primer’ Explores Thoroughly the Moral Implications of Time Travel

At first, Aaron and Abe are cautious about their time loops, to avoid unleashing paradoxes. Not only are they careful, but their minds work in synchrony – two best friends aiming for a common goal. Gradually, their method starts corrupting them with each trip back in time. Personal gain turns into a hidden agenda, and aspirations become delusions of grandeur. Ironically, their mutual distrust starts growing like the fungus that led to their accidental discovery of time-travel technology in the first place.

Because of their abuse of the boxes, Aaron and Abe start to fall apart physically. Morally, the boxes take a deeper toll by turning them into enemies. Abe’s conscience makes him want to sabotage it all, while Aaron’s ambition makes him seek larger-scale ways to replicate their time-travel technology. Two very similar personalities end up falling on opposite sides of the spectrum after getting a taste of its power.

Watching ‘Primer’ Changed Me on a Personal Level

I’m not going to lie – I had to watch Primer twice to understand more than half of it. I hated it the first time, then loved it the second time. The first viewing felt like a whole day to get through; the second felit like a single swift minute. That is the power of Primer’s story and allegories. I’m sure I still don’t understand it in its entirety, but I trust I’ll get it upon future (or past?) rewatching. The same way the versions of Aaron and Abe keep changing, each viewing of the film shapes a different version every time.

Watching Primer changed me to some extent. So, perhaps Aaron’s stance that your future self is better than your past self is real after all. This science class disguised as entertainment blows your mind, and it sticks with you long after. In the end, it might not be my favorite time travel film, but I do acknowledge it as the criminally underrated masterpiece it is.