Happy Friday, IP enthusiasts! I thought it might be interesting to celebrate the end of this hard-fought work week with a movie recommendation. So stop by your local movie rental establishment, or add this one to the top of your Netflix queue, nuke a bowl of popcorn, sit back, relax, and enjoy this flick.
Primer (2004) is a rough cut little gem that is still quite pretty, maybe because of its faults. It follows the cautionary tale of a couple of engineers who spend their off-work hours tinkering in a garage, looking for that next great technology. When they stumble across an invention that they don’t fully understand, the drama and suspense begin to heat up. As they come to realize the magnitude of what they’ve discovered, things boil over with tragic consequences.
Writer/director/producer/editor/star Shane Carruth was literally a one-man show in making this film. He even composed, recorded, and synchronized the soundtrack. Being his first effort at film making, one can’t help but be impressed. It really is no surprise that he took home the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
Personally, I put this one in my top-ten-favorites-of-all-time list. The first time I saw it, the ending floored me so well that I literally started it over, almost immediately, and watched the whole thing again. With a running time of only 77 minutes, it wasn’t difficult in the slightest — still shorter than one pass through one of those lame-ass “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. Knowing the end result added a welcome dimension of understanding to the second viewing. It’s rare indeed to find a movie that keeps getting better each time you watch it, and this is one of those. My hat is off to Mr. Carruth, who manages to leverage his experience as a former engineer, with a degree in mathematics, to keep the dialog authentic, without drowning the viewer in technobabble.
Let me know what you think of the film. Whether you’re seeing it for the first time, or you’ve already had the pleasure, sound off in the comments with your own reviews.
This article was originally published on The Tactical IP Blog.
