Sorry, folks, but I just couldn’t make heads or tails out of this one.

It’s not like Primer is a bad movie. It’s very well-shot and the filmmakers show a great amount of creativity with their reported $7,000 budget. But damned if I could follow any of it.

The film starts with four engineers, working together out of a garage to build something new and great. I have no idea what they were initially trying to build, but the end result is two of them accidentally inventing a time machine. I had a lot of trouble following their dialogue and techno-babble previously, but this is where I had to look up the plot synopsis on Wikipedia to get my bearings. Later on, when the climax rolled around, things got so complex with explanations so murky that I gave up entirely.

Folks, you know me. You know that I’m not afraid of movies that force their audience to think. Additionally, I’m no stranger to science fiction (or science fact, for that matter) and thus, I like to think that I have a very high capacity for absorbing and deflecting techno-babble. But this was so far above my head that I was drowned from pretty much the exact moment I hit “play.”

If you want to watch Primer, be my guest. It’s a wonderfully novel movie and surprisingly well-done for such a low-budget outing. But if you can understand what’s going on before your second or third viewing, you’re either a genius or a liar.

EDIT: Upon further reflection, I think I’ve figured out the movie’s two main problems.

1. The nature of our protagonists. When you really get down to it, the mechanics of time travel in Primer are really no different from the ones in Timecrimes, another arthouse time-travel flick. The difference is that in the latter film, our protagonist was a layman of average intelligence, so the film’s resident scientist had to explain time travel in a way that made sense to him. Primer, on the other hand, stars two men of post-doctorate-level expertise in physics and engineering. Factor in their relationship as friends and colleagues and it’s no wonder that their talk about the causes and consequences of time travel went so far over my head.

2. The running time. Precious few moviegoers know this, but the running time of a film is directly proportional to its budget. The less money a film has, the less can be spent on things to put in front of a camera, the less is shot on film. In this case, the aforementioned $7,000 budget yielded a movie 77 minutes long. And the movie suffers for it, particularly at the end.

Going over the film’s climax in my head, I keep thinking that the events were extremely rushed. There were a bunch of disjointed shots strewn together and accompanied by an overly verbose voice-over talking about what happened and what it meant. It felt like they were trying to cram too much into the film’s final minutes and the result looked like a mess to me. Far be it from me to say that the film should scale back its complexity or intellectual nature, but I can’t help feeling that if the story had more room to breathe and more time to explore what was going on, it would have made for a much better and more coherent movie.