Primer part 1: the right question with the wrong answer

Time travel is a recurring theme in movies; there are hundreds of films which include some element of tinkering with time, from major franchises like Star Trek to unknown gems like Happy Accidents.  Still, periodically a movie comes from nowhere and does something with time that has all the time travel fans talking.  Recently Primer was such a film, one that has become a cult favorite in that peculiar cult of people who think about time travel stories.  It is an intriguing and in some ways baffling film that forces the viewer to think.

The storyline follows a couple of research engineers who while experimenting in superconductors stumble into some anomalies that lead to the development of a time machine.  It is very limited--it anchors one end of a loop at the moment it is activated, and one person can enter it and travel back to that moment if he stays inside it for as long as the machine has been active.  That is, if you activate the machine at one o'clock and then at two you get in, an hour later (by your time) the machine will deactivate and you will get out at one o'clock.  This limits what can be done with it, but they quickly focus on what they can do, such as using closing bell stock reports in the evening to guide stock purchases of the prior morning.

The film asks many of the right questions, but it tends to give wrong answers.  Its theory of time is a bit inconsistent; there is insufficient information to establish exactly what concepts the writers were using to determine the outcomes of actions, and some of the events are inexplicable under any theory.

A detailed analysis of a film like this could run thousands of words.  Its complexity is comparable to films like 12 Monkeys or Millenium.  That level of analysis is for the hard core fans who want to trace out all the events in detail.  Here we will look at a few of the problems the film creates and some of the interesting points it raises along the way.

Our two garage inventors are Abe and Aaron; Abe is the one who determines that they have stumbled into time travel, and he makes the first trip to the past, setting the pattern for most of the trips to follow--but setting it incorrectly.  He is quite reasonably concerned that he might alter history, so he decides to avoid this by spending the entire day sequestered in a hotel, so that he cannot affect anything.  The problem is that he does this on the wrong day.  His reasons for doing it this way are obvious:  he wants to test it, to see if he really does return to the morning of the day he left, and he wants to be able to explain it all to Aaron and let Aaron see his alternate self heading toward the time machine at the end of the day.  The problem is that instead of preserving history he quite specifically alters it.  It would make sense for the time traveler to do whatever he wished his first time through the day, then travel to the past and sequester himself so as to have as little impact on the repeated playing of the day as possible.  However, we know that in the original day Aaron is at work all day while Abe is sequestered, and in the replay Abe asks Aaron to skip work so he can show him something "very important".  Thus whatever Aaron did in the original version of the day has been erased, replaced by Aaron traveling around with Abe.

As noted, it is obvious why Abe did it this way the first time; the problem is that thereafter he tries to do it that way every time, which means that in every case he is always changing history instead of never changing it.  That problem comes into focus the day Aaron gets a phone call that should not have been answered, which is what we will consider next time.