I’m beginning to think that Netflix is the place where bad movies go to die. I love time travel movies and this one had a great premise: Two engineers accidentally discover time travel. That, to me, is a very organic introduction to time travel because that’s how a lot of inventions are created. The set up is actually very good.
A group of small time inventors with their own company are experimenting and desperate for cash. After two of the inventors accidentally discover that one of the objects they used their machine on is covered with a strange fungus, analysis proved that it moved through time.
Unfortunately, their own analysis confuses the plot to begin with. This fungus takes a long time to grow and they eventually figure out that it grows at the rate of 1344 minutes for every 1 minute. Okay, assuming they didn’t just invent a machine that ages fungus, sure, it’s traveling through time, but only forward. One of the inventors has a theory that the age is created by an infinite loop that eventually collapses, meaning that the item is actually traveling back and forth in time, eventually ending up in the future. But one of them theorizes that if the process was stopped at the right moment, they could step out in the past around the time the machine was turned on.
I was willing to accept this theory, but it was hard to hear and the movie just gets more confusing from there. The duo exercise stock options, but in such a boring way, we never get to see the pay off. Where’s the scene with the champagne? Or spending way too much money? At some point, the movie just becomes devoid of any other characters and the development of said characters is non-existent.
By the time this movie ends, you feel like the makers inserted a twist just to have one and it is so poorly explained and visualized that I don’t know if I could explain it if I tried. This movie needed at least another rewrite, two or three more scenes and at least one more character with lines. It’s really just unfinished. So skip Primer, unless you have a working time machine that can prevent yourself from watching it later.
