Ep 77 - Primer (2004)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Primer 2004. A couple of engineering bros trying to make some extra buckage from side inventions in their garage stumble on something much more financially promising. As long as they're willing to take the time to risk it all. [00:00:24] Speaker B: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to our Rating the show where I get together to my friends, we take a movie franchise, break it down by movie, give it an overall score, and throw it back up on the board to see how it rates compared to the movie franchises. Now, this week or this month, sorry, we're doing our March movie Madness where every week this month we're gonna get to choose a different movie. Will's going to choose one, Brian's gonna choose one, and I'm gonna choose one, and we're gonna rate that. That way we don't have to choose one that's part of a franchise. We can just bring something that we love to the podcast, make the other guys watch it and discuss it. This week we're talking about Brian's pick, Primer, Obviously, being Brian Pick, I'm going to start with Will. Will, was this the first time you'd ever seen or heard of Primer? [00:00:59] Speaker A: This is the first time I had seen or heard of Primer. [00:01:06] Speaker B: Excellent. Glad I went to the big screen for that. Yeah, myself as well. I've talked to Brian and he's brought this one up a couple of times, but this is not one that I'd ever really seen or heard. The poster is vaguely familiar, but not like something that was in my local video store back in the day. I unfortunately joined the watch party a little bit late, so I missed the first 20 minutes of this, so I went back and re watched it. So I've seen it now, like, I guess 1.75 times. It's a pretty short movie. It's only coming in at a minute. Sorry, an hour and 17 minutes. But Brian, I'd love to hear your quick take on this. Why did you choose this movie? [00:01:41] Speaker C: I'm a huge fan of time travel, but most time travel movies have huge plot holes because time travel is something really challenging to make sense of, to make coherent, to, to make function and work the way it should. This movie just says, you know what, we're going to confuse you. We're just going to go ahead and confuse you and make this challenging. But in so doing, they enable all of this time travel to really work, at least theoretically. [00:02:12] Speaker A: Right? [00:02:13] Speaker C: And so that's why I like it, because I watch it and I'm like, wow, if that machine really works, then this, this really could Be a thing. And so the poster is, is, is, it's, you know, what happens if it actually works. And, and so it's very exciting movie for me. Not to mention seven thousand dollar budget. I love indie films that can take a small budget and entertain you as well as this does. [00:02:39] Speaker B: Very nice. Yeah. I'm also a big fan of indie films and I feel like I mentioned to you during the Watch Party mood just after. If I had discovered this maybe in my early 20s, like this came out in 2004, I would have been 22ish somewhere in that range. If I discovered it kind of in that era, I might have had a deep, deep love for this movie. It, it ticks all the right boxes for me at a different time in my life. And I'm not, I'm not ragging on it, I'm just saying like, I'm just being honest. I don't know how I don't revisit movies as often now in my 40s as I did in my 20s. Right. Like if this had been something I had in DVD back then, I probably would have watched it a bunch. But with YouTube, Netflix, access to so much content, I just don't feel the same need to go back over and over and over again. [00:03:26] Speaker C: So my big question for you guys after having seen it, Dan, you said you rewatched it. Will, did you rewatch it or was once enough for you? [00:03:35] Speaker A: I mean once was enough for me, but I did rewatch it in the watch Party. I was doing some work and just kind of watching it on the side with the Watch party just because I. I figured I might as well tune in and be there for that. So I did watch it twice. [00:03:50] Speaker B: Okay. [00:03:51] Speaker C: Okay. [00:03:51] Speaker B: Actually, I want to review a question you said last week, Brian, before we get too far into this. [00:03:55] Speaker C: Sure. [00:03:56] Speaker B: Knowing what you know of us, where do you think we're gonna rate this movie? Having had very little discussion about it up until now. [00:04:03] Speaker C: Okay, well, without reading the Room today, I would say that Will would score this one rather high. After reading the Room, he enjoyed this at all. So I don't know, Dan. I, I think that I thought this would be a movie you would really enjoy as long as you understood it. And if you did link link for it, you might re watch it for all the value there is to. Because you re watch a lot of stuff. If it's interesting, you'll turn around and re watch it again. I thought this would be one of those that you would re watch so you could thoroughly understand it and kind of grasp Some of the deeper plot lines that are going on that most people don't get on their first run through. [00:04:48] Speaker B: We'll decide at the end of the movie or in the episode how well that. [00:04:51] Speaker C: Actually, that's right, because at the end of this episode, Dan brings up a billboard of numbers for us to go over and we give our rating on our rating. Get it? We give our rating on these movies and you could see where they land as we average out our scores. We have Dan, Bryan, and Will's high, low, and mid numbers. Those average out and that gives us a score. And of course, we do this for our franchises as well. But in March Madness, it's just going to be the Patreon picks and the individual films that are not franchises. [00:05:21] Speaker B: Nice. Appreciate the additional plug. All right, I. I have, like, this is going to be a hard one to review because I feel like I'm gonna spend the entire episode just asking you questions about this movie that you' so many more times than I have. I was hoping to check out, like a YouTube breakdown of this because there is a lot going on. [00:05:41] Speaker C: If you'd like, I can give you a quick rundown of what actually happened in the film, what the director, Shane Kurth, who plays Aaron, who writes, directs, produces, paid for, did Everything in this film does. [00:05:54] Speaker A: The sound. [00:05:55] Speaker C: Yes, everything. I can give you a quick breakdown of what he somewhat intended for this movie to be. He specifically left out important sequences so that the viewer would be confused and not quite understand what's happening. A lot of people complain. They're like, hey, suddenly there's a guy waving a shotgun around at a party and we hadn't heard anything about this. That's part of it, right? So the Cliff notes of this is that the guys accidentally stumble upon a time machine. And. And Abe creates a time machine, tests it out, realizes it works, but before he tests it out, he makes a fail safe machine. And we don't learn about that till halfway through the film. And then he tests it out and he goes and he shows Aaron. Aaron learns about the fail safe machine that Abe didn't tell him about and uses that fail safe machine to bring back his own time machine so that both of them have a time machine starting at the very, very beginning of all the shenanigans. So at any point in time, they can loop the way back and start over again if they want, but neither of them know that they're doing this. So then as Abe moves through, he starts to realize that Aaron has been looping back and doing stuff over and over and tinkering with things. So Abe goes all the way back to the beginning, only to find out that Aaron had all gone all the way back to the beginning as well. And by the end of the film, you have two competing timelines. Aaron, who wants to mass produce this time machine and make a bigger box and do lots of time travel stuff, and Abe, who wants to truncate this, stop it from ever happening and be the only surviving person with the knowledge of this time machine and let it die with him so that the original Abe and Aaron never create the machine in the first place. And what some people don't understand is that when they go back in time, they are actually duplicating themselves. And as long as they don't interact with themselves, then they will end up getting back in the time machine and going back and then there will be one of them. However, they do start to interact with themselves and they keep themselves from getting back in the time machine. So now there's multiple versions of them. And some theorize there could be as many as 13 Aarons and 6 ABEs running around in this movie, depending on which kind of theory you go by. But they keep looping back and screwing with time and causing problems more and more and more. And that's kind of the. The ugly gist of the film. [00:08:37] Speaker B: I love that you think that cleared it up. [00:08:42] Speaker A: Sounded pretty straightforward to me. [00:08:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:08:45] Speaker C: Quarterback. Yeah. For [00:08:48] Speaker B: do you think taking a concept that's already heady and then over complicating it and confusing it is a good filmmaking decision? [00:09:01] Speaker C: I think it's a dangerous filmmaking decision, but in this instance it works pretty well. I think that Kurith maybe chopped out a little too many pieces and apparently there is a director's cut around there where they go to the hospital and they see, I believe it's Granger. They see Granger in the hospital and there's some information about him basically suffering from time travel sickness. [00:09:31] Speaker B: Remind me which one Granger is. [00:09:33] Speaker A: The one that uses the time machine. [00:09:35] Speaker C: And yeah, remember they're like, hey, I [00:09:37] Speaker A: saw him, Rachel's dad. Rachel's. [00:09:38] Speaker B: I saw him, Rachel's dead. Morning. [00:09:40] Speaker C: But he was clean shaven and now he's got, you know, five days growth beard. That's Rachel's dad, Mr. Granger. And so from that take in the cut that we saw, we know that somebody else is messing with time as well, but we have no idea. That's never gotten into. We just know that time travel got sloppy and something's happening in a different loop that we're not part of. And in the director's cut, apparently they go to a hospital and there's a sequence where they see Mr. Granger and he's suffering from time travel sickness. And there's a little bit more information there to clear that up. And there's also some more information about the party scene with the guy waving the shotgun around. I kind of wish they would have left that in. But it also kind of pigeonholes the movie so that the, the fan theories aren't as proliferant. [00:10:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I don't know if that is necessary in either case just because one, you don't gain that much more information you. From a scene or two as to like how Grinninger got there or what is happening to him post time travel while he's in this coma. That doesn't really matter to what the story is about in my eyes. Like, this is a. A cautionary tale of like if you have access to time travel, you. There's no way you can know how it's going to affect everything once it's out there. And so that's kind of the beauty of not knowing why some of these things are happening or the outcomes of them. You know, that that's kind of part and parcel to why this story works as well as it does as a cautionary tale. [00:11:19] Speaker B: And. [00:11:20] Speaker A: And so I don't think adding to that matters all that much in the end of this movie specifically. [00:11:26] Speaker C: I. I just felt like the Granger bit where they chase him down in the alleyway and the guy's laying on the ground. Like I just, I wanted more. I wanted to know more about that tale because all that served was to, to showcase that things are getting sloppy. That's really all it showcased. [00:11:45] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think it, I think it's. It's the turning point of we are fully unraveled and we are in over our heads. Yeah, they already were. [00:11:54] Speaker C: Yes. [00:11:57] Speaker A: That's when Abe knows, okay, this has gone too far and I have to try to fix things. [00:12:03] Speaker C: And so he goes. [00:12:04] Speaker A: Little do we know that it's too late. He can't fix anything because Aaron's already gone on his dark terrain and he's in his own which world. Right. [00:12:17] Speaker C: Did you guys notice that right from the jump when we start watching, Aaron's already a couple loops in when. When we the viewers start the movie because he already has his earpiece in. [00:12:30] Speaker A: Yeah, when he. [00:12:31] Speaker B: I noticed. [00:12:31] Speaker A: Tell him he's already in. In the loops. [00:12:33] Speaker C: Yes, yes. [00:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I noticed that obviously the second time. The first time I. I Missed the first little bit of the movie and I wouldn't have known what the earpiece was to start off anyways. [00:12:41] Speaker C: Yes. [00:12:41] Speaker B: It didn't really register anything. Yeah, this is a really tough movie to get into. Not only because obviously very low budget and very first time actors. Wait till the end of my review for this one. Because it's, it's not. This movie is not the sum of its parts. The way that Aaron Sorkin writes certain things is he always make sure that you have a character who doesn't know what's going on to be the audience, so that we can always be talking to that character so that you go, oh, that's what's happening. And then you end up watching a movie about politics or the law or whatever it is, and you feel smarter as you're doing it because you're like, oh, I get what's going on now. Because both of the people in this movie are engineers. Even if he asks a question like the, the timer, he's like, why is there a timer in there? He's like, oh, because, oh, I got it. [00:13:32] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:13:33] Speaker B: It's like, no, tell me why the fucking timer's there. Like he stops him, he's like, oh, I understand, I'm smart enough. And it's like, I get that in that situation, both of them are engineers and both of them are incredibly smart. But for the audience sake, you kind of need one of them to be a little bit further behind. Like you've got four people at the very beginning and you almost want to keep the other two in the movie because otherwise why are they there? So that they can be the ones who are like, why is this happening? And have it explained a little bit more to you. [00:13:58] Speaker C: A lot of this. So they actually do explain why the timer is there, but it's hard to hear because. And I think this is a director's choice and I'm not sure if I love it or hate it, but the characters talk over each other a lot in this film. And sometimes it feels like these two are just long time friends and this is how they communicate. Other times it feels like they're both telling their lines at the same time and it's just charbled. And I never really know. I thought it was a choice. They meant for it to be kind of confusing and have people. Like one guy is not listening to his friend as his friend is explaining it and he's trying to talk or complain while his friend is explaining it and you're hearing both things happen at the same time and you miss it. Like the timer thing. The timer is there so that the box doesn't start up and they are not in the room when their future selves come back through it so they can get out of the room. Then the machine starts up and then they pop out of it from the future. [00:14:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it's the same net. [00:15:01] Speaker C: Yeah, they say that, but it's hard to hear because of the way the dialogue works in this film. Did you guys like the dialogue or did you hate it that. That garbled way? [00:15:10] Speaker B: I have a really quick question for you beforehand. Do you know the two main actors, Avon Aaron, Sharon Currith, and David Sullivan? Are they friends in real life? Like, are they, like, do they know each other and be like, we should make this movie? Or is David Sullivan like, a hired hand? [00:15:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I believe the guy who played a David Sullivan was hired. They auditioned Shane Kurth, auditioned for both roles, but couldn't find somebody to play Aaron. So he played it himself. Not that they couldn't find people, but he couldn't find people he. Yeah, liked for the part. Like, to do the dialogue in the way he wanted it to be done. [00:15:46] Speaker B: Sure. I will give them major props for that beginning because they had an ease to them that made me think that they actually were really good friends. [00:15:54] Speaker C: I would have guessed. Yeah, I would have guessed they were really good friends. And that's. That's why sometimes the dialogue felt like it. Like they were really good friends. Talking over each other. [00:16:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:16:02] Speaker C: And that's just how they do. But every once in a while I was like, I'm pretty sure they're both just kind of saying their lines at the same time, and it's coming a little garbled, but I don't know. [00:16:11] Speaker B: Well, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm fairly confident. I read that because they're recording this in the way they are. Like, the $7,000 budget is literally nothing, even in 2004. So they didn't really have good sound recording equipment. So they're actually dubbing everything they're doing. So this might have been kind of a nightmare in the sound editing bay. And I will give them props for that. The dubbing on this is way more convincing than other movies we've seen from higher level production things. I'm gonna go back to Rumble in the Bronx last week or the Dollars trilogy. But like, seriously, for the. The budget these guys have, for the level of skill these guys have, the. The editing of the sound was actually pretty decent in the sense that, like, most of the time when their lips were moving, that was the sound you heard coming out. [00:17:00] Speaker A: My. My issue is with this movie is the sound mixing is bad. So the. I love, like, the ambient sound design in this movie and the background noise of, like, the machine humming and things like that. I really like all those noises and the sound choices, but the mixing of levels is atrocious. And that's what took me out of being like, I can't hear what they're saying, not because they're talking over each other, but because the sound in the background is louder than them. And the mix is just the showing, the amateur nature of the filming. So that's what stood out to me. Not as much as I didn't mind them talking over each other. That naturalistic kind of like everyday conversations. I didn't mind that at all. And a lot of times, if you miss things like the technical mumbo jumbo, they. They don't pull punches in this. They are talking all kinds of tech stuff all the time. And I don't think that matters that much because you see what is happening in the movie enough to. [00:17:58] Speaker C: Right. [00:17:58] Speaker A: To get what, like, their. Their technical terms don't matter as long as you get to see what's happening. And they. They do a good show of showing and telling. [00:18:07] Speaker C: And that walk through with Abe in the beginning as he's walking Aaron through it, he's doing that for us, right? Which is. And then. [00:18:13] Speaker A: And then they loop back and show it again. But, yeah, showing that Aaron already knew everything because he has already been through it. So they like, show you multiple times so you can pick it up along the way. And that's kind of the beauty of the writing in this. And I actually prefer this writing and way of telling us about time travel compared to one of the bigger time travel movies of recently, Interstellar. I felt that that one, the writing told the audience, like, again and again, like over the top of, like, okay, everybody, we're gonna walk you through this again. [00:18:45] Speaker C: And now we're gonna show you on the dry erase board. [00:18:47] Speaker A: Exactly. So I was like, this one treats the audience as just people experiencing it and. And letting you find out along the way. Which I prefer to the hand holding of Interstellar, which is like a huge obviously difference in movies, directors, budgets, everything. But this I prefer. I just hated the sound mix. [00:19:08] Speaker C: Yeah. The sequence when they're looking for the dog and they're out in the waterfall, they're. They're in the center of a water fountain thing. And it was so hard to hear anything. And I was like, why why would you record this scene here? Why. Why would you do this? Like, it doesn't look that good. [00:19:25] Speaker A: And if you're dubbing it, lower the sound of that and up. Let us hear the conversation a little bit. It's just crazy to me. But again, it just shows the lack of experience in the filming filmmaking itself, which is, you know, whatever. This is a. Obviously a huge passion project, which I respect in a lot of cases as well. So I can only ding it so much. [00:19:47] Speaker B: I didn't necessarily have a problem with them talking over each other in certain scenes so much as. Like, there were. There were times where it made it hard to tell when you were supposed to be paying attention versus when what was being said was kind of background fluff. [00:20:03] Speaker A: Aren't you always supposed to be paying attention? [00:20:05] Speaker C: You kind of need to be paying attention the whole time on this one. [00:20:07] Speaker B: Well, on this one, sure. But there's a lot of times in movies where there is stuff that is happening that isn't necessarily progressing. The plot versus the stuff that's happening that is absolutely essential to the plot. And this movie kind of treats both of those as the same thing. Like, the first little bit of this movie, especially, like, if you're walking to this blind, you don't have a Brian telling you what's going on. You're just like, primer, I wonder what this is. And you turn it on. It is a while before they give you any clue as to what is going on in this movie. Like, it is just four guys rambling on about tech jargon in their office. At no point do they correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think at any point in the movie they talk about actual time travel. You can figure out what's going on, obviously, because of what they're talking about, you know, but at no point they're like time machine. [00:20:48] Speaker A: Until. [00:20:49] Speaker C: Until he says this mold would take five years to grow, but I was doing it every five days. That's the first time the viewers go, oh, this is about time travel. And that's a good 20 minutes into the film. [00:21:01] Speaker B: And the movie's only an hour and 15 minutes or something. That's a quarter of the movie. [00:21:06] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:21:07] Speaker B: Where you're just like, what is this about? [00:21:10] Speaker C: Yeah. But there are some subtleties in that first quarter where they're showing aspects of these characters and their personalities that will develop and grow over time. And Aaron, especially as he's kind of. They're having that round table at the kitchen table as they're putting stickers on envelopes and they're talking about what their next project is. Aaron obviously wants to make some money. He doesn't want to be dicking around with the, with the other guys. The other guys are like, that's not really fair. We did your thing, now it's our turn. And you kind of see. And then later, you know, he wants to cut him out of the project altogether. And then it goes on and on and on how he's ready to just stab anybody in the back. So a lot of that upfront is the storytelling of these characters personalities, how Abe is very inquisitive and thinking things through and trying to be very safe. Hey, wait, don't start this. Let me go over the checklist first. Those sorts of things where Aaron is the one who's like, let's go, let's do this, I don't care, let's blow it all up. And yes. [00:22:09] Speaker A: And no though, I, I, I kind of found their characters kind of swapped throughout the movie because Abe is the one who just goes for it. Jump. [00:22:17] Speaker C: Right. Without telling Aaron. [00:22:19] Speaker A: Yeah, without telling anybody. And just was like, dives in. So he feels more like the reckless character. But kind of midpoint, you see that switch and being like, oh no, Aaron is the reckless one. Abe has actually set up the fail safe. He's actually thought it through. He's actually comes across as more reckless, but is the more thoughtful one. [00:22:37] Speaker C: Do you think that's intentional misdirection? [00:22:40] Speaker A: I, I don't know if it's a misdirection. I think it's just like showing, you know, not everything is what it seems in this movie. Right. And I think that plays out well in the writing. The, the only issue I had with the characters in this movie is the emotional attachment to the characters. And this movie, I think decidedly chose to do that on purpose. Like, you don't get really emotionally invested to either one of these guys. [00:23:06] Speaker C: No. [00:23:07] Speaker A: Whereas in a lot of movies you want that emotional investment because you can relate to them or, you know, you know, root for them or whatever. And yeah, this one, you don't really get that. And I feel like that's one of the bigger things missing in this movie. And I don't know if that was like a writing choice or a lack of experience in writing because one, obviously the time travel is the, the forefront of this movie and, and that's what comes across. So mission accomplished, I think. I just don't know if it was a conscious choice to take away that emotional core. [00:23:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I would agree with that entirely. I feel like, by the end of this movie, I don't really have a great sense of who these characters are, what their motivations are. The. The tagline on the poster, there's two. The one you write, I like quite a bit more the what happens if it works. But the other one is, if you always want what you can't have, what happens when you have everything? And I'm like, what does that have to do with the movie that I just watched? Yeah, I don't feel like that has anything to do with this. That feels like a much. A big, grander scope in the movie. [00:24:09] Speaker C: And they don't really go anywhere with it. There are a couple of times when they do bring in the wives or girlfriends. I'm not really even sure because they don't elaborate on the relationships at the very end. Abe wants to stay, and Aaron claims it's because, oh, you should just take your girlfriend in the time machine and then you'll have duplicates of her and you can go live in opposite hemispheres. They never develop their relationships with their family. They never have a reason to. To really care about the rest of the world. And I think that's to its detriment. I wish they would have spent a little bit more time building an emotional relationship. The characters with their surrounding fellows, their family, their friends. And then the audience gets a bit of a chance to see who they are on an emotional level. [00:24:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I. Because I thought at the end when they're at the airport, Aaron is telling Abe, why don't you just take my wife and kid and make duplicates of them if that's what you want so badly? Like, he's almost accusing him of. Of wanting to steal his life. Or maybe I'm wrong on that. [00:25:08] Speaker A: But he does mention a couple of times in the film that he's jealous of his family. [00:25:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is weird because Aaron doesn't seem to give a crap about his family this entire. Yeah. Other than like one line like, oh, I have to drop my kid off, and then I'll be there right afterwards. And the one scene where they're talking with his wife and she does not want to play the game that they're talking about, where they're like, what would you do if you could do this? And he's like, I'd go punch my boss. And she's like, oh, I'm proud of you, honey. You're a hero. And I'm like, the. [00:25:36] Speaker C: And also kind of weird that she calls him a hero. And then he becomes the hero at the party by Stopping the guy with the shotgun, which there was actually no danger in it because he knew the future. [00:25:49] Speaker B: Not only that, there was no danger in it anyways. [00:25:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:52] Speaker B: In the scene where he wasn't there, the guy shows up, doesn't shoot her and leaves. In the scene where he is there, the guy shows up, doesn't shoot her and leaves. Why was this a plot point for 20 minutes of this movie? Who cares? We don't like Rachel. She's not in danger. What are we doing? [00:26:10] Speaker C: Eren wanted to be a hero. And I wonder if as a writer, he was trying to plant that seed in the character's mind by that sequence where she says, oh, my hero. Kind of in a patronizing way almost. And so then he wants to actually be a hero, so he orchestrates this whole thing. And then the narrator, which is also Aaron, by the way, one of the looped errands, we don't even know which one, but it's already in the process, says now that it's been spoken aloud, it can't be undone. The seed has been planted. [00:26:41] Speaker B: That's about punching the boss in the face, though, right? [00:26:43] Speaker C: I think it's about being a hero. I think it's about being a hero. And so correct me if I'm wrong, okay? [00:26:50] Speaker B: Killing the boss or not killing the boss. [00:26:52] Speaker A: Punching the boss, correct me if I'm wrong. In the end, whatever reality at the end of the day, isn't it Abe who saves the day to look better for Rachel? I thought Aaron went through it all and then gave that information to Abe at the end. So. [00:27:10] Speaker B: Yeah, because Aaron's married to whatever his wife's name is. [00:27:15] Speaker C: What do you mean? I'm confused. [00:27:18] Speaker B: Aaron's already married. [00:27:19] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:27:21] Speaker A: To learn everybody's conversation. Know what to say, know what to do. Knows when the guy comes, knows they can go and get the bullets out of his gun. He goes through. He becomes the hero. But they do all of that so that Abe can then do it and become the hero because it's Abe's girlfriend. And my thought was Aaron wanted to do that for Abe. One for the girl, but more importantly for girls. Granger, or whatever his name is, the potential investor, who they to be Granger to be an investor for them so [00:27:51] Speaker C: that they would look better if Abe rescued Granger's daughter. They'd get funding. Okay, this. This is. This makes sense. See, the more you get into this movie, the more things you find about it. Right? That's. That's why I like this movie. Because there's just so many things that are going on. I don't even want to call it layers because there aren't layers to this. It's such a complicated movie with loops and stuff. [00:28:15] Speaker B: It's a ball of yarn. [00:28:16] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a ball of yarn. [00:28:18] Speaker A: Tangled ball of yarn. [00:28:19] Speaker C: Yes. I. I do like that. There are basically two competing timelines at the end. There's Aaron's who's going big with time travel, and there's Abe's who is. He's shut down any ability for people to travel through time from his perspective now they still exist in the same world. And the. The Prime Aaron, if it's even the actual Prime Aaron, we don't know, can be messing with time. But hopefully he will take Abe's advice and stay away from him so the time won't really be affected too much from Abe's perspective. But he'll never know because he shut down time travel in his area. It's kind of complicated. [00:29:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:29:01] Speaker B: It looks like Aaron goes to France and makes a bigger one. [00:29:04] Speaker C: Right. [00:29:04] Speaker A: But. [00:29:05] Speaker C: But isn't. [00:29:05] Speaker A: In the end, isn't there three errands at least? At least. [00:29:09] Speaker C: At least three. Right. [00:29:10] Speaker A: So we know at least to build his own time machine. One, in theory, lives his normal life unknowing about time. [00:29:18] Speaker C: Right. There's another one, the hooded one. The hooded one who was like, we [00:29:22] Speaker A: don't know what he's up to. Right. [00:29:24] Speaker C: Yes. [00:29:27] Speaker A: Whereas there's only two ABEs that we know of. One going through his normal life and one trying to protect ever time travel from happening. Yes. Which you can. [00:29:37] Speaker C: Because from Aaron, it's really interesting. In the beginning, they. They start the time machine with its timer and then they go stay in a hotel room for the entire day being bored. And then at the end of the day, they go back into the time machine after they've already collected their data on what stocks to trade and they go back into the time machine. And then they live their normal day knowing that they're sitting in a hotel room. I personally would have done it the other way around. I would have lived my normal day, then gone back in time and sat in the hotel room and made trades is what I would have done. But they do it the other way. And then they start to get where from Abe's perspective, they start to tinker with stuff and do things outside of the hotel room. It all starts with Aaron. He answers the phone on accident and nothing bad happens. Right. And so then that they know of and they're like, are you okay? Yeah, I feel fine. And they can still Remember everything as well. So they, they start to go, oh, okay. It doesn't rewrite us once we've gone back. [00:30:47] Speaker B: Question about that though, because he, I, I believe in one of the scenes he answers the phone, talks to his wife, she's talking about dinner plans. But then he gets in the box, goes back in time, his clone wakes up, goes through his normal day, does not receive that phone call, and then doesn't know about the dinner plans. [00:31:07] Speaker C: That's right. That's right. [00:31:10] Speaker B: So the wife is just getting more and more pissed off with this guy [00:31:12] Speaker C: who's flaking probably, probably another, another showcase of Aaron being the true villain. [00:31:17] Speaker A: Rightly. [00:31:18] Speaker C: Also, there's. There's one part in this movie where Aaron drops the three letter F word. And I thought that was a weird choice. Maybe it's so casual. Maybe at the time it was not such a harsh word to be throwing out there. But to hear it today, I was like, wow, that really shows what a douchebag this guy is to, to be using kind of terminology like that. So I don't know, that might just be me and my perspective, but it was a weird word because I don't, I don't hear that word dropped like that in cinema very often anymore. [00:31:47] Speaker B: There's a lot of things from this is 2004, but like from the 90s that look bad in 2026. Right. Like, and I'm not excusing it. I'm not, I'm not at all. [00:31:59] Speaker C: I'm just wondering if it was a directorial choice as a hint that this is a bad guy who does bad things. [00:32:05] Speaker B: I don't know. It's hard to say. I, I don't remember. [00:32:11] Speaker A: The conception of him is bad. Right? This version of him's that. [00:32:14] Speaker B: Sure, sure. [00:32:14] Speaker A: I don't know if all of him are bad. [00:32:17] Speaker C: Yeah, you don't know. I mean, the original version that doesn't ever discover time travel from Abe's perspective might turn out to be a great friend and a good guy because he just never gets his hand on the golden goose. [00:32:29] Speaker A: Right? [00:32:30] Speaker C: But because he then has everything, he becomes a bad person. So maybe that other line on the title is, is actually valid because Aaron does discover how to have everything. His cake and eat it too. Three or four times if he wants. And. But he becomes a pretty bad person, screwing over anybody and everybody. [00:32:50] Speaker B: He's not really the one getting everything though, right? Like, to some extent they're giving what they have to the other person. Unless I'm really missing something. [00:33:00] Speaker C: But Abe doesn't want to go back and be that hero for Rachel or Mr. Granger or any of that. Abe doesn't want that. So maybe it was good intention. But by the end of it Aaron's like, we're going to build this big box, we're going to do this. That's obviously greed because he's screwed things up and he knows it. But he's still going to keep playing with time. [00:33:21] Speaker B: I have a question for you. [00:33:23] Speaker C: Okay. Another question. [00:33:26] Speaker B: The way that Abe describes it to Aaron and I have to draw this out. So I'll try and do it without drawing you. Drawing it is you get in at A, go to B and then you can go back to A. But he makes it like a loop. Like you are constantly kind of bouncing off two walls and you can kind of get in or out at one of the walls, right. With the machine that is going because they time it like, oh, this is going to be an eight hour thing. We're going to turn it on now so it's ready for this time. But then with the machine, the fail safe machine that is just on and running for days at a time so [00:33:56] Speaker C: they can go back, I think it's about four days. [00:33:58] Speaker B: How can they get in it at any time that they want and end up back at A? [00:34:03] Speaker C: They don't really explain that one other than to say it's not a one time use like they thought it was. You can, as long as the machines are running, you can do some math and you can get in or out whenever you want. [00:34:14] Speaker B: And time like you have to do, you have to be in there for the amount of time that you're going back. So if you go back four days [00:34:20] Speaker C: for four days, I, I think so. I think either the loop is bigger and you're going to be asleep. The gas themselves because they fill the machine with argon and so they have to have gas to breathe. That's why they need so many tanks. They need a ton of gas to just knock themself out and be asleep for this really long travel all the way back four days. So I don't know if the loop is bigger or if they're looping more times. I'm not really sure. I think the loop is bigger. And so it takes a lot longer to go from B back to A is what it is. [00:34:53] Speaker B: But my point is at any time you get in, is it just B whenever you get in. Like I thought you had to kind of get in at a certain time, get out at a certain time. And then with the big machine it's Almost like you can get in whenever you want and get out at the beginning. [00:35:04] Speaker C: I, I think that from the time the machine starts till you get in, this becomes B, and this is always going to be A, the starting point. So. Yeah, so you can always go back [00:35:17] Speaker A: to when it was started, because that's when it started. You can't go past that, obviously, but you. It. It's running the whole time, so you can jump in anytime to go back to that point point. [00:35:27] Speaker C: And I think the loop just gets bigger, so you have to be asleep in the machine longer. And that's why he needs so many tanks of gas to breathe and get through. [00:35:35] Speaker A: And when Abe goes back, because it's been so long, that's why he's so dehydrated, he's a mess. He faints when he actually goes to talk again to Aaron for the first time, finding out that it's not Aaron the first time. Right. And so he's like. That makes sense because he. It took him four days in the machine, so he's just dead. Right. [00:35:54] Speaker C: When I first watched this, I thought that they were killing themselves and taking over themselves. I didn't know that they were just knocking themselves unconscious and hiding them in the. In the closet. Yeah. And so that's why I thought Abe collapsed because he was so disheartened that he had just murdered himself. But really he was just knocking himself out with that gases xenon on gas or whatever they used to knock him out. [00:36:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I thought it was a. A prestige thing. Whereas, like, well, only one of us needs to survive. And, you know, as long as one of us survives, then that's who we are and we can live our best life kind of thing. Yeah, [00:36:37] Speaker C: but they were also experiencing more time because they'd lived through the same period twice. But also they were in the box, which, like, Abe was in the box for four days. So not only did he was he awake for four days and then he went back in time to do those four days again, but the time it took him to go back was like four days in the box. So that's like three times as much time as he should have experienced, if that makes any sense to you. [00:37:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. [00:37:08] Speaker C: You have the four days that he did twice, plus the time travel itself took four days because he had to go backwards. And that's why when they, when they had a little. The little nugget thing that they put in there at the beginning, it was growing mold on it that wasn't smart enough to get out when it Was supposed to. It just ran through all the cycles until the machine ran down and popped out at the end. And that was like five years, which was actually five minutes or whatever. It was right in there. Experiencing time travel but not really popping out anywhere. [00:37:43] Speaker B: Yeah. So if they don't get out, they just start going back to B again. [00:37:46] Speaker C: Yes. They just keep looping from A to B to B. And it was like something like 13,000 times. And then it pops out for some reason, they don't really explain it, and it didn't really matter. They ended up moving on from that because then they learned how to get out after they go from A to B or B to A. Yeah. [00:38:05] Speaker B: In fairness, it feels like there were a lot of plot points in this that didn't really matter. They kind of just moved on from after a certain point. Like, they just kind of, like, introduced something, talk about it for a few minutes and be like, and we're moving on like there. And if that's the direction they wanted to go to cause the confusion, so be it. But there's a lot of times I'm like, I don't really get what I'm looking at. But now it doesn't matter because we moved on to the next thing. [00:38:28] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. It's hard. It's hard to follow. It's just really hard to follow. That was supposed to be intentional. Certainly is confusing. But because this is a movie that interests me, I was willing to put in the work to rewatch it and understand it. And once you understand it, then you just start seeing things that you didn't even notice. Times when there's two sets of car keys there to showcase, hey, there are two copies of these people in the real world at the same time. So it was kind of interesting. And I liked how they didn't do. Like, they showcased paradoxes, but they didn't showcase stupid paradoxes like Time Cop. Like, oh, if I touch myself in a. In a past, I'll explode the universe or something stupid. Right. Like, they literally fight each other. They're. They're themselves, you know, So I. I like that it was. They kept it really simple. And the paradoxes that did exist were basically like, if I go back and do something different, I still remember what happened to me, but there's a new version of me that isn't going to remember that because the phone didn't ring for him and it did for me. But yeah. [00:39:38] Speaker A: And, I mean, there's multiple theories about time travel. Right. This is kind of more of the closed loop theory that They've. [00:39:46] Speaker C: It's the same universe decided. [00:39:48] Speaker A: Decided upon instead of the multiple universes. Anytime you travel in time, you branch off into a new timeline. And then there's multiple timelines throughout, which they didn't. They. They just nixed that idea. Right. And went with this singular time loop. And. Which is a good. A good thing to do because that lets them, in theory, keep this loop closed. Keep only one of each of them going until things get out of hand, and then you can see how fast and how quickly can unravel and. And how many unknowns there still are and how they try to handle it is interesting to see. [00:40:26] Speaker C: But I really liked how the kid goes down the street, setting off the car alarms and wakes Abe up, and he's pissed he missed all this sleep. And he's like, hey, why don't we just go in the box? We'll just stand in the street, scare the kids away. Then our real selves won't be having this conversation. We won't have to go back in time. That we'll get in the box like we're supposed to and pop out when we're supposed to. Like, it all made sense to him, but he was, like, directly influencing time and rewriting his own timeline so casually. It was crazy. And that. And then, of course, they try to do that, and then they start seeing other things. And Abe's like, oh, crap. We shouldn't be tampering this. [00:41:08] Speaker A: It's already ruined. We've already. [00:41:11] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Was the only. [00:41:13] Speaker B: I'm just potentially forgetting a part of the week. Was the only reason they did that because they talked about it being, like, an experiment, but was the only part of that. So that basically their doubles could get a good night's sleep. [00:41:25] Speaker A: No, no, no. So Abe woke up from the children. [00:41:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:30] Speaker A: Got the idea of like, hey, there's a way with these children that you can go and punch that guy in the face that you wanted to live that experience. Have it. And then we go back and reset, make sure we scare off the kids so that I never wake up and have this idea for us to do this so you still get to experience it. And then we make sure it never happens. [00:41:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:54] Speaker A: So it's their idea of. [00:41:55] Speaker B: But that never happens because the guy's waiting in the car for them. [00:41:58] Speaker A: Exactly. It never happens because they've already screwed the whole thing up without knowing it. Right. Yeah. [00:42:03] Speaker B: Gotcha. [00:42:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:42:05] Speaker C: That's why he says, are you doing this to get a good night's sleep, or are you doing this for me? And he's like, a little bit of both, because he wants. He wants Aaron to go ahead and have that experience, but he wants to get a good night's sleep, so. Which is crazy. Like, let's. Let's wreck the timeline to get a good night's sleep and put your boss in the face. [00:42:26] Speaker A: That just, like, goes to show again. It's like the elevation of, like, as you do this more and get more comfortable with it, you get more loose with maybe what you should and shouldn't be doing. [00:42:37] Speaker C: The rules. Yeah. [00:42:38] Speaker A: Testing things and doing things you shouldn't do. [00:42:40] Speaker C: At first, they talk about trading market cap stocks because the volume is so huge they can't really influence it. Later, they're just like, hey, let's pick anything that's got big movement. I love that it was kind of out of character, but I loved that Aaron was like, well, what does this company do? And Abe's like, what does it matter? It goes up. That's all we needed to do. And there was like, no, but I really want to know. I think it should have been. They should have reversed that, and Aaron should have been the one who didn't care what they did. And Abe being the inquisitive one, wanting to know everything, he should have been the one who was like, what do they do? But they got those backwards in that. And so it was weird. But I did like that they were wondering. One of them was wondering, I'm still [00:43:22] Speaker A: on the other side of the fence on that. Being, like, you get to see the switching characters. [00:43:26] Speaker C: Oh, okay. [00:43:27] Speaker B: Yeah. I was gonna say the same thing. Because, like, at that point of the movie, you are thinking, Abe is the reckless one for just making a time machine and jumping. [00:43:34] Speaker C: Yeah, right. [00:43:34] Speaker B: And it's not so late. You realize, like, oh, Aaron's the one that's been messing with this since the very beginning. [00:43:39] Speaker A: Also in that scene, Aaron says, oh, it's my first day, so I'm not really sure. And going back, you know, it's not his first day. He's already been doing this time travel thing. And I think they do a couple of kind of jabs at that, which are kind of pretty fun throughout the movie, giving you those hints of, oh, Aaron's been here before. So he's kind of being cheeky here in some of his dialogue, which is fun. I also saw a theory online, which I thought was kind of interesting, that explained the inability to write anymore, that Abe and Aaron both were suffering from after time traveling. And it's not that the time traveling itself that they were doing was causing that. But in the beginning of the movie when they first kind of get this machine running, they both put their hand in the machine and pull it out because they feel whatever is happening to them. And people online are saying that their theory is their hand is desynced with the rest of time. So when they're trying to think of the letters, their hand can't keep up with what they're writing. Oh. So I thought that was a really cool kind of theory because they both stick their hand in the machine in early and just pull it, pull it out at a random time. Right. So it desyncs their hand a little bit. That's kind of a cool thought. [00:44:53] Speaker C: Yeah. So maybe their hand experienced more or less time and so they no longer react. [00:45:00] Speaker A: Yeah. And it was just like a brief moment but it was enough to like throw off their writing because their motor skills are screwed because of it. Right? [00:45:08] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. So what do you guys think of this film as a seven thousand dollar film? Do you think this was a success? I mean $800,000 national tickets sales. That's a something like made 78 times or something. I don't know. It made money. [00:45:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:30] Speaker B: $545,000 off of a $7,000 budget. Not bad at all. I think despite what we have to say about this movie, there's no way of looking at this where this is not a success. From a passion for passion project. He got to make it, got to put it out. The world at large accepts it as being better than being pretty good. Not like amazing, but being pretty good. From a financial perspective. He made gosh, way more than 8, 000 times money. Now he doesn't get to keep all that money. I'm sure it goes to different places and whatnot. But still to go from $7,000 to $545,000 is pretty incredible from an awards perspective. This has won a couple of awards for him. So like he, it kind of hit the critics mark, the audience mark, the financial mark. Like there's not really a good way of saying that this isn't a great investment. And if none of that happened, he still is making his pro passion project come to life for less than the price of a car. Probably could pay this off pretty easily. Worst case scenario. I think, I think that portion of this is absolutely incredible. [00:46:31] Speaker A: Yeah. No, for. For a guy who literally couldn't take a second take because they didn't have the film to do it, the movie went a long way for sure. Right. I think they had like 80 minutes of footage. The movie ended up 78 minutes. [00:46:49] Speaker B: Barely anything left on the floor. [00:46:52] Speaker A: So yeah, I think, I think there was probably a lot he learned and a lot he had to learn. I think it took like three years for him to write the script or something. It took him a long time to actually get this thing going. But when he's doing everything, it makes a lot of sense as to why and without spending all that money. It's kind of funny because it feels like he's the character in the movie. Right? Like he doesn't have a lot of money. They're just in the garage tinkering with their own ideas and like talking about, oh, I can maybe get the money from here or maybe we can, you know, wait on this, you know, oh, we don't need all of these, whatever the magnets are to make the barriers. We can cut them in half. We didn't. We were over redundant thing. Those. It's like very like interesting how, how it parallels real life to the movie in. In how it was made. Which is cool. Very cool. [00:47:43] Speaker C: Looks like he's in Aaron. The character. The character Aaron plays in quite a bit of stuff. He's got like nine different previous things. Tales from the Loop is a show I watched. He's in two episodes of that. The Girlfriend Experience, Memory Box. A couple of things that I've seen. I don't remember actually seeing him in it, but it does from what I've seen from him in this movie. I would be curious about more of his works. Whether he's writing, directing, or acting in it. I would be curious. I'd also like to see Abe in some more stuff. I thought his character was interesting and I want to see what that guy can do. [00:48:20] Speaker A: Yeah. I think out of the actors in this movie, if you can call them that, I think Abe's character, that actor has actually done quite a bit of work since Shane. Less. But I think Shane is kind of in his own building or doing work that he believes in. And passion projects, not so much. He doesn't care about what Hollywood is doing. So that's kind of why he hasn't done as much but probably is very happy with what he's doing. [00:48:45] Speaker B: Yeah, he wrote and direct at least one other film called Upstream Color. [00:48:51] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm gonna be checking that one out. I don't, I don't know it yet. [00:48:56] Speaker B: It's got about a fifty thousand dollar budget, so more. But still very, very, very low budget. [00:49:00] Speaker A: Yeah, 100. I also found a little thing that. And this ties into the knives out Franchise. Our boy Ryan Johnson of Knives out, he did Looper, which is a time traveling kind of cop movie and with Bruce Willis and what's his name? [00:49:16] Speaker C: Love me some Looper. [00:49:18] Speaker A: Yeah, Gordon. Gordon Lovett. And anyway, he sent the script to Shane to be like, hey, let me know how this works out in time travel. And Shane got back to him saying, this is bad. I'm wondering if Shane gave him some, you know, pointers and tips on that to maybe elevate that time travels portion of that movie. Right. [00:49:41] Speaker C: Yeah. Because. Because Looper is what they call a gin story. A gin in time travel is something that exists within a loop. Something started it, but you aren't ever going to know what, because the thing that starts it is because of it. [00:49:55] Speaker A: Right. [00:49:56] Speaker C: It creates itself in. In a loop. And that's Looper at. I don't want to spoil that movie for you, but it creates its own timeline and so I, I do love time travel gin stories. I think those are amazing. They're so much fun to watch. There's a good one with Ethan Hawke if you can get around all the sex changes. But that was, that was a cool one too. That's actually a written story. Lots of great novels and short stories about Jin time travel. And those are really interesting. This isn't a jinn story, though. I bet there's probably a fan theory out there that makes it one. So I, I'd be curious to hear it. [00:50:33] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. I do think just this movie in general is just kind of regarded as one of the best time travel movies because of how focused it is and on how detailed it talks about the what ifs and what can happens and, and outcomes. Various different outcomes. And they, they explain away a lot of different aspects of the theories of time travel in this movie. Whereas a lot of other ones are like, oh, time travel is the reason the story's happening, but we don't care how it works, we just need it to tell the story. [00:51:06] Speaker C: Right. [00:51:07] Speaker A: Right. So I think that's where this, this fundamentally is different than most time travel movies and why it's held in such high regard, if that makes sense. [00:51:17] Speaker C: Yeah. What do you guys think of the special effects of this costly film? Time travel box made out of PVC special effect. In this movie, there's not really. I'm not even sure if they really turned those magnets on in real life. Like when they go to put like the, the confetti. [00:51:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:51:39] Speaker C: Paper punch. The paper. Paper hole punch. [00:51:41] Speaker B: They. [00:51:42] Speaker C: They pan over to the other camera to look through that screen. The Monitor screen so they could put it in. Because they probably didn't. They probably just dropped it. It fell through because there wasn't anything going on there. So that was an interesting way to do it, I think. [00:51:55] Speaker B: Slowed the footage down. How did they do that with, like, the budget, access to. [00:52:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm not sure. [00:52:01] Speaker A: I'm not sure. I mean, that was. That's the beauty about. I love hate about this movie is they have, like, a lot of those really smart shots. Directorial. There's so many very good shots in this. And then there's so many. So many horrible shots. It's like, oh, dang, man. Like, some of these things, I think, because they were forced to be creative in, like, that scene, you get very creative shots and really, really pleasant viewing. And then a lot of other shots are like, okay, well, we can just set the camera down and we'll just chat through it. And it's like, a lot of boring shots. So it's interesting in that way. [00:52:38] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. I just think that with. With a budget this low, what they did was incredible. So they get higher points because of what they were working with. But at the same time, there's no special effects or practical effects. Hardly at all, really. It's just. It's just clever cinematography, really. [00:52:58] Speaker A: Yeah. And some editing to make it look like there's two people in the same plane of existence, Right? [00:53:04] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:53:05] Speaker A: By literally cutting and not having them on screen at the same time. [00:53:08] Speaker C: Yes. Just showing somebody's back. [00:53:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:53:11] Speaker B: Well, what you're talking about how the movie character kind of mirrors the real character. At one point in the movie, they're, like, gonna break their fridge just to get some copper wiring. Because that's how broke they are at this point to try and make their dream come true. I'm sure they didn't break a fridge to make this movie. But, like, it kind of feels like that. Like, they're just scrapping everything together, putting whatever they can into the film to be like, okay, let's just grab and do what we can. As you said, the time machine's made out of PVC and duct tape, essentially. It was like, probably just stuff they had lying around, Right? [00:53:42] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:53:44] Speaker B: You had to write this or. [00:53:45] Speaker A: I don't mind that. I don't mind that. Yeah, I think I'm good to rate. Yeah. [00:53:53] Speaker C: I don't remember we going in the same order as usual, or are we doing. [00:53:57] Speaker B: I would love to go last, but. No, we can go in the normal order. [00:54:00] Speaker C: What's the normal order at this point? Normal order. [00:54:03] Speaker B: You're here every week. You don't know what the normal order is. Jesus Christ. [00:54:09] Speaker C: Well, it is my movie. I guess I can go first. [00:54:12] Speaker B: I love you man, but wow. If you like what we do and you want to help support us, consider joining our Patreon. There's a link down below. You shout out to our producers as well as our executive producers, Real Bubba, Hotep and Dino. And a massive shout out to our head writers, Elder Jam990 and Ms. Hillary. Thank you all so much. [00:54:31] Speaker C: I love time travel. I think this is one of the best time travel films that you can watch. It's complicated, it's deep, it has, I hate to use the term layers to it because it doesn't work like that. It has loops to it and lots of theories and lots of interesting stuff that I could talk about endlessly because I just kind of enjoy this content. And then the fact that it's made so cheaply and still done so interestingly. It's not perfect, needs a lot of polish for sure, but still was a ton of fun for me. Probably I can't even pick a thing that was probably the worst. Maybe the acting, I think the dialogue was a choice, but not necessarily a bad one. Those might be the lowest points for me in the film and didn't bother me at all. It. It almost just lended character to this film. If. So I keep going back and forth on the scoring of this one, so I'm just gonna throw it out there. I think it's an 84. I think this is a really incredible film. A lot of that high score is driven by the fact of how cheap it was. If this movie was made for $500,000 or even a hundred thousand dollars, I would say, nope, that's not that great. It's still a fun movie to watch. But it's, it's. It would bring the score down, you know, five, ten points at least. But because they did this on seven thousand dollar budget just kind of blows me away, puts me in awe and makes me wish that more people would get out there and with 5, $10,000 make movies like this for us to view and watch and hopefully even rate. Because I think this is just one of those things that Hollywood didn't have any part of this. Those are some of the best movies for me to watch. [00:56:17] Speaker B: The thing with Primer is that it is not the sum of its parts. If I was to rate this movie the way I average the normal movies that we talk about, it would be an incredibly low score because there are a Lot of things in this movie that just don't work for me. The sound is not very good. The cinematography is very yellow, very blue. And that might be a choice, but it's not necessarily an appealing one to look at the acting in the sense that I believe that the two main characters are really good friends is good, but they're never given anything to do. They talk in the exact same tone the entire time. They're never really angry at each other. They're never really elated about anything. The one scene where the wife is like, good job. You're a hero for wanting to punch his boss. I honestly don't know if that was supposed to be sarcasm or she actually thinks he's a hero for wanting to punch his boss. It just kind of confused me because I can't read what she's trying to convey. The. The plot of this movie is incredibly dense and hard to get through. I don't think that that makes it bad. It just. You really have to know what you're getting yourself into when you watch something like this. If you stumble across this movie, I almost guarantee you're not gonna have a very good time, unfortunately. That said, I really like a lot of what this movie is doing. The fact that it's made for $7,000 gives its huge props because that is an incredible accomplishment. As we said, it hits the nail as far as critics, as far as audiences, as far as budget goes. It. It. It did incredible things. This is a movie that I watched last Sunday with the Watch Along. I watched it again on Tuesday. I don't know that I'll watch it again, but I wouldn't be surprised if I do. It's one that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Now, granted, I can't stop thinking about it because I'm trying to make sense of it, because it does not make sense. So you kind of have to know that you're walking into this one, knowing that you're going to want to watch it multiple times, knowing that you're going to want to have people to talk to about it, knowing that you're probably going to want to look up something on YouTube to explain. Explain it to you. If that sounds fun to you. This is going to be a really fun film. If that sounds like homework, you're not going to enjoy this. And that makes it kind of hard to score this one, because normally the categories that I'd use would make this very, very low. But I can't deny that what this is, is an accomplishment. I did enjoy it. I may or may not watch it again. I'm not really sure. I can't go as high as Brian is, though, because this is only my second viewing. And when I was saying that if I enjoyed this in my 20s or found this in my 20s, I might have enjoyed it a lot more. When Brian was talking, I realized why that makes sense to me. It's because in my 20s I was surrounded by friends who I could sit around and talk to this with. Whereas now, family man at work, I don't have that social circle as much, except for here on Thursday nights. So this has been an incredible hour. Going through a bunch of stuff, kind of opening my eyes to a bunch of stuff. That's where this movie is going to shine. But if you're just watching something on a Friday night, I think there's going to be a pretty hard miss for you. Unfortunately, because of how dense this is, I gave this A62. [00:59:08] Speaker C: That makes sense. That checks. That's actually a really good rating for this film. I think that that, that explains a lot. I mean, I'm sad about the lower score, but honestly, you could have come in at a 34 on this. It wouldn't have surprised me. I just don't know. You could land anywhere on this film, really. [00:59:25] Speaker A: He could have come in at a 34. He could have. [00:59:29] Speaker C: Here comes Will getting his matches ready. Gonna burn this mother down. [00:59:35] Speaker B: Don't get revenge on Dan on this one. This is Brian's movie. Wait till next week to get revenge. [00:59:39] Speaker A: It's funny to me because I could find a lot of parallels to this movie to Rumble in the Bronx. You know, it's somebody trying to tell their story in their way. Jackie Chan trying to showcase his unique style of entertainment and succeeding. Shane trying to create the most intense time travel movie and pretty much succeeding. But if you. If you don't go for it, you don't get the ratings from some people. No, just kidding. It's all good. It's all good. I didn't mind this movie. I thought, you know, I've. I've said a million times, I love the passion projects. I can parallel this to the likes of Evil Dead. You know, a dedicated group wanting to create something, doing everything they can to make it happen. Shout out to Sam Raimi, the best director we know. Thanks, Dan, for confirming that. And yeah, this. This took off. It hit Sundance and people loved it. And so it got limited theatrical release and made way more money than I think the creator ever thought it would. And the beauty of this is because. Feels kind of like Knives out where it is very layered like an onion, whether that's the right term or not. But there's all of these fun little details put into the movie that you can go back and notice if you didn't catch them the first time. And that does show a very great detail in the script work of the story itself. That said, there's plenty of issues with the script itself as well. The lack of emotional core in this movie does pull you out a little bit. It makes it feel a little clinical. The lack of experience in film making does take you out a little bit with the. For me, the biggest one, the sound mixing was actually the detriment that that's probably the, the biggest strike against this movie that I can find was the sound mixing because it was just so piercing at some points when it really just didn't need to be and tipped me out of the movie. That said, I think it's a great time traveling movie and the theories brought forth are very tantalizing and make you want to discuss it. I think Brian bringing it here goes to show that we talked about this easily for an hour and could talk about it longer. And I think we all discovered things from each other just from hearing, you know, each other's versions of what we saw and understood from the movie. So I think that's perfect. And the beauty of if you want to watch this movie now, like in the present day, is you've got the Internet and you can look it up. There's still plenty of theories being posted about this movie today, so it's very cool how the Internet can kind of keep that alive. Overall, lots of issues with this movie. Lots of great things. 63 out of 100. I would watch this movie once, I watched it twice. I probably wouldn't watch it again. But for what it is and what it's trying to accomplish, I think it does a pretty good job. [01:02:47] Speaker B: And with that we find Primer coming in with a 62, an 84 and a 63 for a grand total of 70, putting it just below midway on our list for the Patreon picks. March Movie Madness. Brian, I know this is way too low for you, but I was hoping [01:03:04] Speaker C: it would be A Fish Called Wanda. I. I definitely think this is a better film than Shutter Island. I think more thought went into Primer, more passion went into Primer than Shutter Island. So I definitely think it belongs up there, at least with it. So yeah, I'm not, I'm not super happy about the score, but you guys are, are correct in that there's lots of flaws in this film and it drags it down. [01:03:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, yeah. [01:03:38] Speaker C: I don't know. [01:03:39] Speaker A: I'm not upset by it. Of course it's fine. I think it is a well deserving movie to be seen. You should give it a chance. Whether you are into it or not obviously will affect your final outcome of this movie. Right. If you're not like a time travel lover like Brian, it probably won't hit as hard as it does for Brian. And that's any movie, any genre. Right. Like if you're not into the sci fi thriller of time travel, you're not going to be as into this movie as Brian. I love the concept of time travel and I think this one executes a lot of the theories and things really well. It just maybe doesn't hold up in a lot of other areas, which is fine. I wouldn't change this movie for the world. I wouldn't want to see a remake of this movie even if Shane headed the whole thing. I think the beauty of this movie is how it was made and what they got out of it with what they had or didn't have. [01:04:34] Speaker B: I will say, looking at this list, even though it is in the bottom half, let's say with the exception of maybe Moon, this might be the next one. Like this is has the best possibility of me watching it again out of the movies on this list and could climb pretty significantly based off of multiple viewings. You said you've seen this one multiple times, Brian. [01:04:54] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm well over a dozen for sure. [01:04:56] Speaker B: So this one has a better chance to climb. Look, it's. It's lower than A Fish Called Wanda, but I don't think I'm ever watching Fish Called Wanda again. Whereas like there's a decent chance I'm gonna re watch this one. Moon, City of God, Sound of Music, there's a good chance I'm gonna see those again before whatever, before passing on. But like the bottom half of this I'd be pretty okay not seeing with the exception of Primer. So like, who knows? [01:05:23] Speaker C: Yeah. Like you said, Dan, if you're interested in going down rabbit holes, this is a fantastic movie to do so because there's so much content on the Internet and people who want to talk about this film because there's so many neat things that you can find in it. So if that's. If that's your bag, go for this. If time travel is your bag, go for this. If indie films are your bag, go for this. If none of those strike a chord with you, then. Then this probably isn't for you because. Because you're going to get stuck on the cinematography. You're going to get stuck on the poor sound quality. You're going to get stuck on the questionable acting or, or character writing in this film. You're going to get stuck on those things for sure. Those are hard stopping points for some people, but I love time travel. I love indie films. I love talking about stuff with other people. So this just really hits hard for me. [01:06:14] Speaker B: All right, that is our rating of Primer. But what do you guys think? Were we way too harsh on this indie darling, or does this score make a bunch of sense to me? You and you're going to skip on this one? Let me know in the comments down below. I'd love to hear from you. We record this live over at Twitch tv, the Mongoli Show. So if you want to head over there and hit the follow button, you can hang out with us every Thursday night at 9:00pm Eastern Standard Time. Or if you made it this far in the video, you probably enjoyed it, consider hitting the like and subscribe button. So we see you in the next one.