Shane Carruth
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Connections, in both directions
It does for quantum physics what Primer did for time travel.
Shane Carruth came up a bit earlier in the conversation, and Coherence should certainly be filed on the shelf next to Primer – this film has a similar uneasiness in its tone, also achieved by way of what-the-fuck-is-going-on style plotting.
It’s the way co-writer-director James Ward Byrkit — a longtime Gore Verbinski collaborator — focuses not on brainiacs, as in “Primer,” but on smart but mostly under-informed NPR types, who know enough to slowly piece all this together but not enough that they don’t usually descend into blabbering, shouting and drinking.
Although Byrkit confines his actors and his largely unscripted story to the house, “Coherence” soon reveals its true setting to be some nocturnal twilight zone located at the juncture of Luis Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” and Shane Carruth’s “Primer,” all superior exercises in cine-surrealism.
The idea-based ones, such as Primer or Moon , are often low-budget, set in simple, limited locations, and using concepts rather than computer effects.
I would place Primer and Memento on that list.
"Looper" is informed by, and pays a kind of respectful homage to, those pictures, and it's also got some precedent in the no-budget sci-fi indie " Primer ."
With Looper, the borrowings are no less obvious, whether in the plotting (recent sci-fi mind-fuckers like Primer and Timecrimes vie with elements of noir and Bad Seed–style bad toddler behavior), the settings (the dystopian city of the future is drawn from countless cinematic models), or specific touches (the hired thugs in 2072 dress like spaghetti western bandits).
It was both a comfort and a concern to learn Shane Carruth of Primer fame had assisted Johnson in figuring out the mechanics of time travel here; a comfort because Primer is one of the finest time travel features ever made (and on a shoestring, no less), and a concern because it requires dozens of watches to totally unpack.
(This wouldn't have been the worst crime; you might have ended up with a new Primer, the absorbing 2004 indie from Shane Carruth, who reportedly assisted Johnson with some of Looper's time-travel elements .)
Primer, the 2004 cult item adored by geeks and ignored by most everyone else, seemed to take that as its subject, unveiling a wholly different, dizzyingly complicated way of looking at the problem.
Looper has new ideas in a genre that hasn’t had any since the 2004 indie time-travel movie Primer.
An encounter with Synchronic’s mysterious creator reveals shocking details about the effects of the drug, and Brianna’s possible whereabouts, at which point Synchronic pivots from dark, atmospheric crime drama to idea-driven hard science fiction in the vein of Shane Carruth’s Primer .
The use of video diaries, whiteboards and time travel feel reminiscent of Primer with a dash more humor, thanks primarily to Steve’s partner in crime: his dog.
We can more or less divvy up time travel flicks into two distinct categories: Unrealistic, but fun ("Back to the Future," "Avengers: Endgame") or, in adhering more to the dense laws of physics, pretty impenetrable ("Primer," "2001").
Like their earlier genre picture “The Endless” (and its clearest influence, “Primer”), “SYNCHRONIC” can best be described as egghead indie sci-fi, in which the ideas are as exciting as the effects.
Memento (2000)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
influenced Primer (2004), Upstream Color (2013)
Themes Plot Visuals
Carruth, to his credit, is more interested in the moral ramifications of time travel, in making something more reminiscent of "Memento" than of "Back to the Future."
Written in a style that resembles David Mamet (if Mamet were a particularly testy computer repairman) and edited with a sense of obfuscation that seems deliberately, almost perversely, designed to thwart pleasure (or easy analysis), "Primer" has been compared to films like "Memento" and "Pi" -- far better, smarter and more stylish puzzlers that at least paid dividends for the viewer's investment of time and mental exertion.
The story is elliptical -- the last 45 minutes are especially abstract -- but fans of "Memento" will enjoy teasing out its meaning.
It's imperfect like the device at the center of the film, but it's the most demanding movie experience since "Memento."
In this way, Primer is weaker than Memento.
With a style reminiscent of Christopher Nolan's first films (Following and Memento), he assembles his story with jarring but engrossing crosscutting, masking the small budget with assured camerawork, evocative music and extremely subtle performances.
Carruth, to his credit, is more interested in the moral ramifications of time travel, in making something more reminiscent of "Memento" than of "Back to the Future."
A Back to the Future without special effects or a Donnie Darko without innocence, Primer is the minimalist 2001 for the post�Bill Gates generation.
Substituting the giddy fantasy of Back to the Future for grave technological authenticity, the film (written and directed by star Carruth) has its one-dimensional characters spout endless streams of high-tech gibberish as a means of convincing us that the fantastic device was born not of make-believe magic, but rather from practical scientific ingenuity.
Or perhaps there's a generation of filmgoers who haven't seen Back to the Future, specifically the scene in which Michael J. Fox returns to the past just in time to glimpse an earlier version of himself re-enacting a scene from earlier in the film.
You’ve seen Back to the Future, and so has Carruth: doubles of characters soon start appearing, continuums get knocked out of whack, much technobabble is spouted—all that’s missing is the doctor with the shock-white hair screaming about flux capacitors.
Primer runs on the same sort of time-travel trippyness that drove 1985’s Back to the Future , but its inexplicability goes far beyond the pseudo science at its center.
Written in a style that resembles David Mamet (if Mamet were a particularly testy computer repairman) and edited with a sense of obfuscation that seems deliberately, almost perversely, designed to thwart pleasure (or easy analysis), "Primer" has been compared to films like "Memento" and "Pi" -- far better, smarter and more stylish puzzlers that at least paid dividends for the viewer's investment of time and mental exertion.
Oft compared to Darren Aronofsky's Pi, the film bears a closer resemblance to Robert Connolly's similarly-minded techno-get-rich-scheme/quantum-mechanics thriller The Bank.
Conceptually, Primer evokes similarly minimalist science-fiction efforts such as La Jetée and Pi, but it also channels super-independent films becoming of the past decade: most notably, In the Company of Men, with which it shares a diminutive production budget and anonymous corporate setting.
Winner of the grand prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Primer mixes the straight, middle-American white male angst of Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men with the sci-fi trappings of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi.
The closest recent precedent to Primer is Pi, which put an even more grimy aesthetic to use in its yarn about the discovery of a mathematical system for predicting stock-market activity.
Similarities between Primer and Pi can be drawn, but Primer succeeds where Pi didn't because it deals with something that all humans are curious about...time travel.
Synchronicity has some superb inspirations - the intricately nested timelines of Primer , the dusty, DIY science fiction of Alien , the vintaged futuristic anywhere city of Blade Runner and Dark City - but it's also very much its own thing.
On par with films like Timecrimes, Predestination or even Primer to a degree, Synchronicity once again proves that you don’t need a huge budget to create a compelling cinematic experience.
Also, this isn’t like Primer and up its own ass; as technical as the jargon gets you will always be able to comprehend the gist of what is actually being explained or discussed.
Writer-director Jacob Gentry, who made the middle third of the underrated exquisite-corpse horror film The Signal , appears to have boned up on his Heinlein and Bradbury and Carruth, the last of whose Primer remains a blueprint for any hungry young filmmaker looking to blow minds on a budget.
Think of the cut-rate thrillers, from “Primer” to the Spanish “Time Crimes,” to say nothing of the scads of budget-conscious TV episodes and entire series that have managed something interesting in the genre without “Back to the Future” bucks.
Compared to Primer for instance, which was so exhaustively invested in the intricacies of time travel, Synchronicity is more often just long winded.
Donnie Darko (2001)
Directed by Richard Kelly
influenced Upstream Color (2013), Primer (2004)
Themes
(Another likely influence or parallel would be Richard Kelly, he of “Donnie Darko” and “Southland Tales.” ) You could read the film as the story of life on planet Earth, with some vague degree of mysticism but no default to spiritual or supernatural beginnings, or you could say (despite my claim earlier that human society is nearly invisible) that it’s a parable about life in a downward-trending economy.
For every viewer who fell in love with the wilfully mind-boggling Donnie Darko or The Fountain , there's another who gave up long before the end credits and posted an angry IMDb diatribe about their ordeal.
Maybe we’ll see the release of a Donnie Darko -style 'Director’s Cut’ down the track, purporting to filling in some of the gaps.
There’s nothing wrong with a sci-fi film attempting subtlety and ambiguity; look at Donnie Darko , a fascinating and entertaining movie that is nonetheless nigh-impossible to understand without annotated supplements (or a lot of far-fetched theorizing).
A Back to the Future without special effects or a Donnie Darko without innocence, Primer is the minimalist 2001 for the post�Bill Gates generation.
Fans of 2004's mind-bendingly complex time-travel exploration " Primer ," as well as those viewers that found that heady indie film too difficult to follow, should be first in line to see the Spanish-language "Timecrimes" ("Los cronocrímenes").
Less a mindfuck on the level of 2004's ingenious Primer than a sort of mental canoodle, this modestly diverting slice of shoestring Spanish sci-fi from writer/director/co-star Nacho Vigalondo proves yet again that time travel is an ambitious low-budget filmmaker's jumbo Erector Set.
But the same holds true for J.B. Priestley's play "Dangerous Corner," or the films "Back to the Future" or "Memento" or the little-known indie "Primer."
Similar in tone to Shane Carruth's too-smart-for-its-own-good Primer (in which a pair of Dallas engineers inadvertently whip up a time machine in their suburban garage) but far more engaging, Timecrimes has nabbed a spate of awards, among them the Next Wave award at 2007's Fantastic Fest.
Filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo has infused the proceedings with an unapologetically hard-edged sensibility that's ultimately reminiscent of Shane Carruth's similarly-themed 2004 effort Primer, although there's little doubt that Timecrimes fares a whole lot better than its intriguing yet hopelessly impenetrable predecessor - as Vigalondo generally does a nice job of ensuring that the movie remains easy enough to follow for the duration of its appropriately brisk running time.
Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes), Nacho Vigalondo's zero-budget exercise in kitchen-sink quantum metaphysics, doesn't fuck itself with an unearned sense of smug self-satisfaction like Shane Carruth's Primer , but it does prove to be more tantalizing than satisfying.
Here I was reminded of Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 feature O Lucky Man! but maybe that’s just me.
Despite the aural nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey and a shot that recalls Solaris, Europa Report has more in common with Shane Carruth’s Primer in terms of tone and scale.
Further differentiating this from something like Prometheus is the level of authenticity brought to the film, with well-done practical effects, believably detailed production design, and some surprisingly savvy dialogue that feels knowledgeable about astronomical terminology without shoving the viewer’s face in it (contrary to a film like Primer).
No one else today approaches the genre in quite this way; the only precedent I can think of is Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).
A Ghost Story (2017)
Directed by David Lowery
influenced by Upstream Color (2013), Primer (2004)
Plot
The conceit that motivates this turn makes the science behind, say, Shane Carruth's Upstream Color seem about as naturally explicable as that of An Inconvenient Truth —and at the same time, it's a conceit that basically rips off, then dumbs down, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar .
It’s shot with elegance, grace, and design, yet it still preserves a sense of spontaneity and associative logic thanks to some on-set editing by Shane Carruth, of Primer (2004) and Upstream Color (2013) fame.
It was tough to predict that one of these triumphs would be the latest project from Pete’s Dragon director David Lowery, whose work I first encountered at my very first Sundance in 2013, when he was in Park City as both the editor of Shane Carruth’s intoxicatingly strange Upstream Color and the writer-director of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints .
Lowery edited the moody, metaphysical mystery Upstream Color in 2013, and this year he co-wrote the screenplay for Alexandre Moors’s adaptation of the Iraq War novel The Yellow Birds .
It’s shot with elegance, grace, and design, yet it still preserves a sense of spontaneity and associative logic thanks to some on-set editing by Shane Carruth, of Primer (2004) and Upstream Color (2013) fame.
(Another likely influence or parallel would be Richard Kelly, he of “Donnie Darko” and “Southland Tales.” ) You could read the film as the story of life on planet Earth, with some vague degree of mysticism but no default to spiritual or supernatural beginnings, or you could say (despite my claim earlier that human society is nearly invisible) that it’s a parable about life in a downward-trending economy.
Oft compared to Darren Aronofsky's Pi, the film bears a closer resemblance to Robert Connolly's similarly-minded techno-get-rich-scheme/quantum-mechanics thriller The Bank.
It also has elements of Shane Carruth’s little seen 2004 time travel movie Primer, The Edge of Tomorrow, and Duncan Jones’s Source Code.
-If someone tried to make Primer and a James Bond movie all at once, it would be Tenet.
If you know your time travel, though, you’ll realize that there’s little here that hasn’t been done before in Primer , Looper , Doctor Who , or even Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban .
(Es cierto que viéndola pensaba en el 'mind-fuck' que es Primer (2004) de Shane Carruth o en la fascinación del nuevo mundo digital creado por las hermanas Wachowski en Matrix (1999), pero la realidad es que yo no he visto en mi vida nada parecido a Tenet.
Like David Lynch’s seminal Eraserhead , the film that most often came to mind in my furious effort to somehow contextualize Upstream Color, Carruth’s film feels like a subconscious flow of fears and anxieties.
With a style reminiscent of Christopher Nolan's first films (Following and Memento), he assembles his story with jarring but engrossing crosscutting, masking the small budget with assured camerawork, evocative music and extremely subtle performances.
Carruth portrays the couple's courtship in scenes so evocative they reach heights of cinematic lyricism rarely seen on film since Jean Cocteau's Orpheus (1950).
This sci-fi puzzler by cinematographer-turned-director William Eubank often recalls the work of Shane Carruth (Primer, Upstream Color) in its low-budget resourcefulness and creeping, gnawing paranoia, though the fascination with the mechanics of the human body connects it to a much older sci-fi tradition.