Comments on: Primer

By: My Favourite Games Of 09, by Tom Francis

My Favourite Games Of 09, by Tom Francis — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 02:14:10 +0000

[…] Braid Time-travelling platformer. I get irritated with time travel movies, Primer excepted. No! He wouldn’t fade from the photo, idiots! He’d either never have been […]

By: Jason L

Jason L — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 14:54:32 +0000

You obviously cannot have failed to read http://www.primermovie.com/story.html , but I nevertheless want to attach it here – primarily because I love the bit about a trained maths nerd deciding to, essentially, treat the process of filmmaking as an equation to be solved or a cryptographic ciphertext. And succeeding.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 21:49:29 +0000

Bob: yep, but they're sensible enough to try to avoid it. At first. Later the relationships between instances of the same person get wonderfully insane. I could have happily watched uncomprehendingly for another hour as the complexities come to a boil and the batshit stuff starts happening.

Grill: I actually liked that naming convention once I got my head around it, partly because it reflects a theme of the film. Throughout there's this idea that whoever's gone back the most is the one on top of things, and the other one's just a patsy playing into his hands. So seeing at a glance that A is one up on B gives it a bit of social context that makes it easier to keep track of.

By: craigp

craigp — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 23:48:03 +0000

It’s true – i r dumb. I think, perhaps, a comfortable warning would have sufficed about what I was about to experience. I mean, I knew I liked Donnie Darko, but had no clue to it’s meaning until the director’s commentary. If I know ahead of time I’ll be baffled I’m much more comfortable with it.

I think it’s a movie that enjoys a good prodding: I enjoyed it more after reading Wikipedia than when I was watching it.

By: Grill

Grill — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:05:26 +0000

It’s a great film. Though the nomenclature they use in that Wikipedia explanation is very confusing – numbering people by the number of exits they’ve made, rather than whether they’re the original, duplicate, or triple at a given time.

By: bob_Arctor

bob_Arctor — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 16:52:30 +0000

Sounds cool. Question: do they meet themselves in the past, if you see what I mean. Can they meet themselves, can they double up by getting in the time machine with themselves, and meet a third?

By: Zeno Cosini

Zeno Cosini — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 14:31:07 +0000

I saw it at the ICA at the end of last year. It was in a double Bill with La Jetee, which is the film Terry Gilliam adapted to make Twelve Monkeys. Primer was great. About a dozen of us talked about it in the pub afterwards, and whilst we’d all enjoyed ourselves, no two people agreed EVEN REMOTELY about what had actually happened in the film.