My main reaction to the movie is like what I felt about Inception, although for a different reason. In Inception, Christopher Nolan wasn’t content to use his modestly clever idea once; he just had to do it four times. Yet he explained everything at every step of the way, so his dream-within-a-dream recursion became surprisingly boring. Shane Carruth similarly felt he had to complicate his story, but, taking the opposite tack from what Nolan later did, Carruth omitted things, under-explained what was happening. His film became annoyingly inscrutable. In both cases, my basic reaction was “Why?”

Inception seemed to me mostly pointless, but I’ll leave that alone as it’s not the subject at hand here. If Primer has some value other than the puzzle it presents, then the complexity of what Carruth presents is actually a detriment. I think there is some value to his tale (beyond the puzzle, that is); it’s the value of seeing the human consequences of a new scientific power. But I wish he hadn’t fragmented and obscured it so much.