Primer (2004) - Watch 1, impressions and questions

10 Sep 2017 mind-bending · movies · primer · sci-fi

Well. This movie is one hell of a mind-bender.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

This is a great movie that you don’t want spoiled. Watch it yourself and you will have a GREAT experience trying to figure everything out. (Not that I am there yet, but I have a feeling it will be great!)

Of course, I didn’t understand everything. I sort-of have a sketch of what really happened, but I am not sure on the details, and the last 15 minutes of the movie totally went over my head. For this watch, I am just going to list the things that I could make out. This definitely simplifies the plot, but the specifics are still hard to get.

• First of all, the characters.

  This is Abe:

  

  And Aaron:

  

  Abe’s girlfriend is Rachel Granger, and her dad Thomas Granger is “their last, best hope of funding”.

  Aaron’s wife is Kara. They have a daughter Lauren.

  Philip and Robert are two people who appear in the first scene, and once after. They don’t really matter (as for this viewing), so they can be safely ignored. It’s only Abe and Aaron who matter.

• They don’t like / hate Robert Platt. This is something related to the funding, it got pulled or something. The hate is important because Aaron, who is generally defending him, later proposes an idea where he can punch Platt once, but then stop himself from doing it. Thus, having experienced the punch but not having to live in a world where there would be consequences. More on this later.

• Chronologically, there’s some science-y stuff and they build something. It’s not really clear what they are building. The mass of objects they keep inside decreases after some time. At a first run, the machine just sort of runs smoothly for a bit but when they run it again for the box, the machine vibrates a lot and then just stops.

• Soon after the first run, Abe is asleep at his place, at 7 pm. Whether it’s already started, I can not tell. There are two people on his couch, Brad and the “Man on the Couch”. This again stumps me.

• Anyway, Aaron shows Abe a mechanism with which he has a stable method to reduce the mass of something by 10%. Still quiet unclear about what’s really going on. They also notice that unplugging the batteries keeps the machine going for a few minutes before it shuts down. They call this “blocking gravity” inside the box.

• Now, about 20 minutes into the film, is where the looping begins. We aren’t really sure who it is, but an Abe walks out into the terrace of an office building. The camera fades into the shot of Abe walking towards an Aaron. So, the walking Abe might not be the same as the terrace Abe, and actually, I think they aren’t the same. It is worth noting here (and I just realised this) that the first time this happened, Aaron was NOT able to reach Abe the whole day on his work or cell because Abe is already doing this every day! He’s already called in sick, and has left his cell phone making him unreachable, and maintaining the perfect symmetry each day. This happens somewhere around noon because after this, Abe takes Aaron to the protein thing, shows him all of that, then they go to the lab where they do the watch thing, and finally, when they have eaten, it’s 315 and Abe is walking into the storage shed to lie there for the next six hours to come out as a new Abe.

• From the end of the movie, it’s clear that the Aaron sitting on the bench with the headphones, is listening to the conversation that’s about to happen. There had to have been a time when it happened for the first time, or the second. As the narrator says at around 64 minutes, the second time Aaron came back, “It wasn’t so easy. He didn’t expect me to put up a fight. But I realised he simply wanted it more. He had already performed the tasks I had intended to, of recording the conversations of the day, as I had intended to.” So, the second time Aaron came back was when he met the narrator, fought with him and took the narrator. Who is the narrator? (That’s a question I have been unable to answer, still)

• The night of Robert’s birthday party is the same day as the time when Abe tells Aaron for the first time what the machine really does, the same day that they put the watch into the machine for the first time and figure out what it really does. The same day with the protein build-up sequence. Rachel goes to the birthday because Abe asks her to, and Rachel’s ex-boyfriend shows up with one of Aaron’s friends. The ex-boyfriend brings a shotgun out and Aaron rushes him, eventually saving everyone. They call him “the hero” for doing this. Abe reprimands him at having done this without thinking about Kara and Lauren. The first time that this happens in the movie, Aaron doesn’t have headphones plugged in, which leads me to believe that this reprimand from Abe is the first time that Aaron even does this, and Abe is NOT at the party this first time because he doesn’t know about it and has to hear about it from Robert. He decides to go to the party after he knows what’s going to happen there, Abe definitely does NOT go to the party the first time.

  This particular event becomes an obsession with Aaron and Aaron seems to keep repeating this sequence, again and again until he is satisfied with how events turn out. As the narrator says, this might have taken 3 or 4 times or even more. No one can say. This sequence, and the constant changing of what’s happening seems to be what makes the two of them come undone from the routine they had going which made a lot of money but didn’t have any recognition from anyone.

• The first time the protein buildup scene comes up, Aaron is wearing the headphones, which means it’s not the first time he’s going through it. He’s actually already gone through it once and is simply following the script to keep everything the same.

• The scene in the movie where the put the watch in and notice the 1300 thing, doesn’t have Aaron with the headphones which perhaps means that that is the first time that that happened. Note that by this time, the human sized box already exists and is in the storage shed. Abe has already built it. Aaron still is only understanding the box, whereas Abe has gone ahead, built the box, gone back in time, and is NOW explaining the box to Aaron. (while Aaron’s equivalent Abe in this world is actually seen by Aaron walking into the storage shed at the time they walk in through the binoculars)

• So, clearly Abe has been doing this more times than Aaron has. Abe also figures out that he can make money by simply figuring out which stock grew the most in the last 6 hours, then go back, get out of the box and buy that stock. Essentially, starting 830 am, Abe and Aaron spend 6 hours in the hotel, 6 hours in the machine and were able to go back in time, to eventually get out of the box at 850 am.

• This is a small drawing I made of how the double really comes to be: (wherever there are two lines overlapping, the doubles co-exist)

  

That’s about all I have time for now. There are still several things that are unexplained:

• Thomas Granger: What’s he doing? Why’s he following them? How did he travel back 2 or 3 days? Why would they even let him know about the machine or let him use it?

• Fail-safe: Who built this machine? Why did he build it?
• The killing in the failsafe machine’s room, Abe kills someone. Is it Abe killing himself or Abe killing Aaron? I am leaning towards the former.
• What is the exact sequence of the way stuff goes down? (This is the question that will finally hold the answer!)

Clearly, this is a GREAT movie.