Am I missing something?

[kickaha]

Just watched Primer, after months of having folks tell me it was an amazing mind-fuck, and avoiding all spoilers.

So, um, where was the mind-fuck? Seemed like a pretty straight-forward time travel story with multiple causality loops. Well done definitely, but I kept waiting for the big wowzer moment, and then the credits rolled. Ernh?

Seriously, did I miss something?

Edit: Yes, I loved it. :) Just wondering, seriously, if the DVD skipped a chapter or something. Not because it didn't make sense, but because it *did*. My one naggling question was Rachel's Dad. That seemed ambiguous.

(Watch it, if you haven't.)

Comments

[icebluenothing.livejournal.com]

It's not really much of a mindfuck; most of what happens is pretty straight-forward, although poorly-explained in an "oh-look-aren't-we-clever-by-not-telling-you-jack" kind of way, I thought.

But yeah, Rachel's dad is ambiguous, and is meant to be. The characters don't know where the hell he came from, so neither do we.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

My speculation when he popped up was that the party had gone badly, and Rachel had been killed. They had told him about the Box ("So you would [tell someone else] if it were an emergency?") that they could go back and fix it, and he'd gotten stuck in one of the loops. Now that I think about it, the 'someone else' was in fact Rachel's Dad during that conversation. Since Aaron at that point was already looping through several times, I suspect he was almost-confessing to Abe, or thinking about telling the dad on another trip through to garner his support, and the scene in the car was him playing ignorant yet again.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

And now that I think about it, Rachel's dad had '2-3 days beard growth' when they saw him in the car... and the timer on the back-up box said 3 days and change at one point.