Primer won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and is really one of those cool Cinderella stories. Primer gets it's fairy tale cache primarily due to the fact that the film was made for a paltry $7,000 - and the one-man-band hat trick carried-off by Shane Carruth. Carruth wrote, directed, edited, scored and starred in this fascinating "what it" tale of time travel.

Primer is not a Back To The Future type affair, but rather a somewhat realistically drawn small-scale story that revolves around a couple of tech-types who stumble onto a strange little phenomenon. For several years a small group of engineering and computer programming buddies have been conducting some ad hoc garage research in hopes of developing an alternative energy source that they can harness and market.

Abe (David Sullivan) and Aaron (Carruth) have invested the most in this wannabe cottage industry, they are the closet friends among the group and Aaron has volunteered his garage to the cause. Thus, when they notice an odd side effect of their research, they break away from the group and begin to explore the potential of what appears to be a way to alter the time/space continuum.

Fed up with night after night of this extracurricular work, they rush headlong into this new venture with little regard to the potential risk that using themselves as time travel guinea pigs engenders. After testing their technique on a few inanimate objects they decide to construct chambers large enough to accommodate their bodies and are soon dabbling in time travel. Both are already amateur on-line stock traders and their first order of business is to simply check the stock reports at the end of the day to see which stocks gain the most during the day, then set their contraptions back to the same morning and purchase as many shares of the stock they possibly can, bada-bing they're on their way to being millionaires.

As far as the film itself, it gets off to a pretty slow start - mostly consisting of a lot of scenes where the group of moonlighting inventors sit around in their shirts and ties, arguing and communicating in a kind of techno-speak that is a little too obtuse and in general fails to engage the audience. However, once the time travel aspect of the story kicks in the film really takes off and the dialogue becomes much more interesting. Considering the budget, the look of the film is impressive enough, and considering the garage science involved the low-tech effects are perfectly suited for home-made looking cinematography.

Primer's biggest liability is it's failure to address some major logistical questions that the films premise brings about in the third act. The main lapse of plausibility involves Abe and Aaron's doubles. Their time-travel process creates duplicate Abe and Aaron's and the film never offers any explanation as to what happens to these doubles - where do they go? what do they do? and how does their existence affect their lives or Aaron's marriage etc. Primer sidesteps these issues altogether and then runs into even bigger problems when Carruth introduces further paradoxes in the story.

With their newfound ability to make loads of cash, the two time travelers begin to feel some ill-effects of the long days of tinkering with the laws of physics. They become ill, their is inexplicable bleeding and they also notice that their handwriting has suffered to the point that it looks like the hand of a first grader. Then out of nowhere, the father of Abe's girlfriend shows up at his house in really bad shape - ostensibly due to the fact that he has discovered their secret and has been doing some time traveling himself. This part of the plot is never satisfactorily explained (at least to anyone with an IQ under 200) and the subplot just sort of goes away after they drug him, in order to get him back into the time booth and perhaps dialed back into where he's supposed to be (in time.) Again this is pretty much a guess, as Carruth allows this thread to dangle.

Primer is a fascinating film, that really could have been as brilliant as Pi, but the third act really falls apart. The ending involves a scenario where Aaron and Abe decide to travel back in time and insert themselves into a scenario where a former boyfriend of Abe's girlfriend shows up at a party with a shotgun. It's not clear at all if their desire is to save lives (because in reality nothing bad happened) or if they just wanted to pop up, wrest the gun away from the guy in order to appear as heroes. This part of the film is just terribly convoluted and really lame when you think about it. It just seems like Carruth could have concocted a lot more compelling reason to risk traveling this far back in time and affecting the causality that they are constantly concerned about.

Primer is an interesting film, that sadly could have been so much better, had it not unraveled so badly toward the end. Still Carruth created alot of movie for $7,000 - you've got to grant him that.