Primer (film) - Reception

Reception

Primer received broadly positive reviews in the mainstream press. The website Metacritic rated Primer at 68 out of 100, while the similar site Rotten Tomatoes reported that 72% of the critics that saw the film gave it positive reviews, and the site listed it as one of the best science fiction films "for the thinking man."

Many reviewers were impressed by the film's originality. Dennis Lim of The Village Voice said that it was "the freshest thing the genre has seen since 2001," while in The New York Times, A. O. Scott wrote that Carruth had "the skill, the guile and the seriousness to turn a creaky philosophical gimmick into a dense and troubling moral puzzle." Scott also enjoyed the film's realistic depiction of scientists at work, saying that Carruth had an "impressive feel for the odd, quiet rhythms of small-scale research and development."

There was also praise for Carruth's ability to maintain high production values on a minuscule budget, with Roger Ebert declaring: "The movie never looks cheap, because every shot looks as it must look." Ty Burr of The Boston Globe commented that "aspects of Primer are so low-rent as to evoke guffaws", but added that "the homemade feel is part of the point."

The film's unusually complex plot and dense dialogue proved controversial. Scott Tobias writes for The A.V. Club: "The banter is heavy on technical jargon and almost perversely short on exposition; were it not for the presence of voiceover narration, the film would be close to incomprehensible." While for the Los Angeles Times, Carina Chocano writes: "sticklers for linear storytelling are bound to be frustrated by narrative threads that start promisingly, then just sort of fall off the spool." Some reviewers were entirely put off by the film's obfuscated narrative. Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter complained that Primer "nearly gets lost in a miasma of technical jargon and scientific conjecture."

"Primer is hopelessly confusing and grows more and more byzantine as it unravels," Chuck Klosterman writes in an essay on time travel films five years later. "I've watched it seven or eight times and I still don't know what happened." He nonetheless says it is "the finest movie about time travel I've ever seen" because of its realism:

It's not that the time machine ... seems more realistic; it's that the time travelers themselves seem more believable. They talk and act (and think) like the kind of people who might accidentally figure out how to move through time, which is why it's the best depiction we have of the ethical quandaries that might result from such a discovery.

Ultimately, Klosterman says, the lesson of Primer regarding time travel is that "it's too important to use only for money, but too dangerous to use for anything else."

The film has been selected to be part of The A.V. Club's New Cult Canon.

Donald Clarke, film critic with the Irish Times, included Primer at No. 20 on his list of the top twenty films of the decade (2000–2010).