BACK TO THE TIME MACHINE

Let me start this by saying that I love time travel movies. This stems from a much larger love of science fiction movies altogether, but time travel really brings out the “what if” questions. Most of them are preposterous like, "what if a women travels back in time, get impregnated and gives birth to herself?", and some are based on the chaos theory like "what if you make one tiny change in the past but it alters the entire course of human history?".
I guess what I really love about time travel movies is that they highlight the question of whether we (humans) are truly autonomous or are we following some predestined chain of events.

There are two time travel movies that I’d like to recommend, although one is just a half recommend and I’ve only seen it once and it was recently.




Timecrimes is about a man who experiences a bizarre series of events and eventually stumbles upon a time machine where he must hide to escape an unknown attacker. After traveling backwards in time he becomes so afraid of altering his past self’s experience that he does some awful things so that nothing is different from how he experienced it before. It’s an interesting concept and runs opposite of most time travel movies where characters are going back in time so that they can change what their past self experienced.



The second recommend was a recommend to me from Chris Dahl, and is called Primer. I was shocked by how much I enjoyed and continue to love this movie. Primer is different from other time travel movies in so many ways. First of all, the whole movie was made with less than a thousand dollar budget, but it feels like any high budget indie film. The filmmakers really knew how to work with what they had. Secondly, Primer leaves the hockus-pokery out of the equation and looks at time travel as any other innovation, a scientific experiment with unexpected yet explainable results, and accidentally discovered by two normal Joes in their garage. Lastly, Primer throws wrenches in the audience's perception of events because it's difficult (at least at first) to decipher which time line the audience is observing at any given time.

The characters in Primer are so real. Basically they are just like any IT guys you know. They are on the geeky side of normal, they talk shop even when they are not working and they have no real adventures in their lives. They are two pedestrian engineers who accidentally discover time travel and they struggle with how to utilize their new power without abusing it. Their awareness of paradoxes initially keeps them away from their past selves, but they eventually exploit their abilities to play the stock market and beyond. Ultimately, Primer examines what extremes the protagonists will go to in order to prosper, to learn, to experiment and to protect the biggest secret they’ll ever have.

Expect a lot of twists and turns in this one, but don’t expect to understand them all or even spot them all the first two, three or seven times through the movie. While Primer does have a David Lynchesque “what the fuck just happened” quality about it, each viewing rewards you a little more instead of leaving you even more confused. I highly recommend this one and will happily lend it to anyone or will come watch it with you. I never tire of this movie.