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97% positive over last 12 months
97% positive over last 12 months
100% positive over last 12 months
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Primer [DVD]
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Additional DVD options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
DVD
January 28, 2013 "Please retry" | — | 1 |
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| $10.32 | $11.43 |
Watch Instantly with | Rent | Buy |
Primer | — | — |
Purchase options and add-ons
Genre | Mystery & Thrillers, Action & Adventure |
Format | Color, DVD, NTSC, Dolby, Subtitled, Closed-captioned, Widescreen |
Contributor | Carrie Crawford, Jay Butler, Samantha Thomson, Ashley Warren, Anand Upadhyaya, Chip Carruth, Juan Tapia, Shane Carruth, Casey Gooden, John Carruth, David Sullivan, Delaney Price See more |
Language | English |
Runtime | 1 hour and 17 minutes |
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Product Description
Product description
Everything you think you know about modern science is about to unravel in this critically acclaimed film about two young engineers and the consequences they face when they invent a machine that enables them to travel back in time.Running Time: 77 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/THRILLERS UPC: 794043784927
Amazon.com
Primer won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and has drawn repeat viewers eager to crack writer-director-star Shane Carruth's puzzler of a time-travel drama. Carruth, an engineer by training, plays inventor Aaron, whose entrepreneurial partnership with fellow brainiac Abe (David Sullivan) unexpectedly results in a process for traveling back several hours in time. The men initially use these rewind sessions to succeed in the stock market. But a dark consequence of their daily journeys eventually complicates matters. If this sounds like a very commercial, science fiction thriller, Primer is anything but that. Shot on 16mm for $7,000, the film has a tantalizing, sealed-in logic, akin to Memento, that forces viewers to see the fantastic with a certain dispassion. One may be tempted to sit through Primer again to more fully understand its paradoxes and ethical quandaries. --Tom Keogh
Product details
- Aspect Ratio : 1.78:1
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
- Product Dimensions : 7.75 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches; 0.32 ounces
- Director : Shane Carruth
- Media Format : Color, DVD, NTSC, Dolby, Subtitled, Closed-captioned, Widescreen
- Run time : 1 hour and 17 minutes
- Release date : April 19, 2005
- Actors : Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya, Carrie Crawford
- Subtitles: : English, Spanish
- Language : English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), Unqualified
- Studio : New Line Home Video
- ASIN : B0007N1JC8
- Writers : Shane Carruth
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #81,174 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #1,847 in Science Fiction DVDs
- #4,216 in Mystery & Thrillers (Movies & TV)
- #7,968 in Action & Adventure DVDs
- Customer Reviews:
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The joke goes: What do they do with engineers who turn 40? They take them out and shoot them.
A quartet of engineers who work for a Dallas semiconductor company have decided to pool their talents in their spare time to develop an original invention, a break-through process or a patentable idea that will have commercial applications and deliver them from the dreary tedium of their work-driven lives before the promise of their most productive years slips away and consigns them to permanent disappointment.
They are not geniuses. "Meticulous, yes. Methodical. Educated. Nothing extreme." On their best days, they might be considered "clever."
In their off duty hours they work in long-sleeved shirts and ties. They conduct experiments on the cheap in a garage with borrowed equipment. They buy electronic components from Walmart. They cannibalize a microwave oven, a car, a refrigerator. Brimming with notions, they speak in elliptical sentences and argue briskly in the language of physics and electrical engineering.
"They took from their surroundings what was needed and made of it something more."
Abe and Aaron are the first to see sparks fly from their flints. After months of fruitless tries, they produce a field in an enclosed box that creates more energy than it uses. "There was value in the thing." They knew that. What might be its practical application? "They were out of their depth." They realize that "the easiest way to get exploited was to sell something they did not yet understand." They decide to cut out their partners.
More weeks of hit and miss experiments reveal a stunning fact: their box drew its energy from a continuous feedback loop that could return its contents to the past. They had built a time machine.
The next step is inevitable: they must test their device on themselves. They build a pair of coffin-sized boxes to generate their field. Aaron asks, "What is your opinion on how safe this thing is?"
Abe shrugs, "I can imagine no way in which this thing could be considered remotely close to safe."
The device has its limits. It does not propel its occupants into the future. It can only return them to the moment at which it was activated. Abe and Aaron warm up the boxes for five days, enter them, and return to the past.
The practical application is obvious. The device grants them five days of prescience, enough certain knowledge of outcomes to reap fortunes from jackpot lottery numbers, sports wagers, and spectacularly performing market securities.
There are also complications. The past is exactly as they have left it and it includes them as they were before they traveled backward in time. They have become their own doubles.
They are alert to the peril of discovery by their doubles or by anybody who might detect them in two places at once, wives, relatives, friends, or their partners unaware of their invention. "If we're playing with causality..." Abe worries. They take themselves "out of the equation" by sequester in an out-of-town motel, disconnecting phones, television, radio - anything that might keep them connected electronically or emotionally to their personal world.
Leaving their doubles to continue replaying the crucial five days, Abe and Aaron repeat their trips back to the original moment of their machine's activation, returning each time with an accumulation of knowledge they can transform into exponential growth of bankable cash.
Their circuitous repetitions of time travel take a physical toll. Their ears bleed. Their hands lose the ability to fashion script. Their decision-making faculties lose focus. Aaron voices a fantasy of violent confrontation with an obnoxious superior, "just to know what it feels like", then explains that he would subsequently prevent himself from the act by intervening before it occurred. Abe reminds him that contact with their doubles must never happen. The consequences would be inconceivable. But "The idea had been spoken. The words wouldn't go back after they had been uttered aloud."
"I'm not going to pretend I know about paradoxes." Aaron admits. "About the worst thing in the world is to know that the moment you're experiencing has already been plotted."
In a moment of shocking clarity, as Aaron and Abe observe their doubles from afar, they realize that they have no way of knowing whether either of them, without the knowledge of the other, has already altered their past. Mistrust has introduced a variable into their equation. The permutations are terrifying.
"What's worse," Aaron wonders, "thinking you're being paranoid or knowing that you should be?"
Writer/director Shane Carruth, who also edited and stars in the film and composed its music and sound effects, is a one-man band, who produced "Primer" on an onion-skin budget, stocked the cast and crew with friends and family, and delivered a taut, intricate, visually arresting, intellectually stimulating gem. Crafting film virtue from raw necessity and quicksilver imagination, Carruth employs low-key realism in cost-conscious characters, tech-heavy dialog, taped-together props, and naturalistic lighting. With quickening pace, the narrative contours move from the familiar to the fantastic. It is a convincing fable of garage science yielding profound innovation with infinite implications.
"They took from their surroundings what was needed and made of it something more." "Primer" is an alchemical miracle: base materials transmuted into cinematic gold.
I’m a self proclaimed “movie buff” and after watching thousands of movies, sadly this falls under that category of movies that if you haven’t watched it by now it’s not super impressive anymore. It’s too late for me. Time travel movies are some of my faves but I took too long to watch this. But if you like your time travel movies and you’re a movie watcher, it’s still on the must watch list.
My major criticism about this movie is the same that has always been the major criticism that everyone else has. It’s a little clunky in the way it lays things out. The movie takes a lot of time trying to explain the “time machine” like it actually works and it’s unnecessary. They talk about the components and the problems they’re having with metals and electromagnetic fields like it’s real science and it’s really reaching to sound smarter than it is. When the time travel finally happens in the second half of the movie you feel a little lost because the REAL reason for the time travel is with held for far too long. Also the way they use time travel in this movie is one of the more complicated styles of time travel and they definitely should’ve found a way to explain it to the audience. Sure the character themselves say out loud that they don’t fully understand how it works but really it needed it. Finally, this is more for people who really understand time travel on a complicated level. It’s a movie that comes off smarter because it LEFT OUT information, which rarely is the case. Basically, the movie micro focuses on the way the characters were experiencing the time travel situation and not actually telling the story that involved the time travel.
Top reviews from other countries
They will make you think long after the movies have ended.
Hopefully the director Shane Carruth will be able to continue on his fascinating journey of filmmaking.
Ok, lets get one thing straight, I can tell my 2001s from my 2012s and I'm generally considered a bit smarter than your average plank. That all said, in complete honesty this film left me furiously scratching my head and effectively plastered a vacant, bemused look across my face for days.
Famously filmed for around $7000 (!), the film looks great, and certainly its stylistics do little to betray the meagre costs invloved in production.
The set up to the complicated narrative is handled well, and for the first half the pacing is extremely well measured allowing the interesting story to develop naturally. The film succinctly and effectively outlines the personalities of the central characters, and the reasons behind the busy goings on in their garage; a necessary element of all films albeit one that is often overlooked and one that is vital to this story.
However once we hit the mid-way point the film appears to speed up, and the previously controlled pace disappears, leaving the viewer to struggle on in attempting to decipher just what the hell is going on. If anything I feel the film's 78 minutes works strongly to its disadvantage, had the film been longer then more time could have been given over to properly outline and discuss the events in the final half, rather than leaving the audience scrabbling to keep up.
Of course films which laboriously point everything out are usually boring, patronise their audience and often suck any magic from the experience which may have been gained. This film however leans too heavily the other way, with not enough information being conveyed for the viewer to be able to make any meaningful sense of the story.
Perhaps the budget prevented a longer filming schedule, perhaps the bits we need to understand what happened were left on the editing floor. Perhaps it was meant to be like this all along.
In summary, certainly a good film, most definitely a very interesting film, well acted and very well shot; its just a bit too cryptic for me, and I suspect for 95% of us out there.
I'm on my third viewing, and there will be more. I'm convinced you can make sense of this film, it appears that it may just take a while...
Great for: Thoughtful nights in with a visual rubix cube.
Not great for: A 'first date DVD', (unless,l of course, your she/he happens to be a physicist).