Troy Dick. Studio Shane Carruth. Genres drama thriller science-fiction. Still don't get it. Hold on. Who dropped my rating half a star? I did. I did? Next week. Yeah, that sounds like me I'm such a twat sometimes. I know. So that's when the idea of putting a human in becomes interesting. He can decide to come out. Lets say he starts a box at , turns it off at and gets in. If he stays for the whole cycle, he will stay in the box for approximately minutes.
But if he gets out when his timer indicates one minute so just the time to go from B to A for the timezone inside the box , then he comes out of A at And he sees of course his double turning on the machine. ANyways that's what I gathered from this very interesting movie, hope it helps. Romain: Your breakdown of how the machine works in the film is accurate. You or I, or any other physical object , will continue to subjectively experience time passing because we have no choice, our atoms are structured this way.
The subjective experience of time while in the box is described as parabolic, meaning one is oscillating backward and forward, backward and forward instead of just forward in time. Like a loop. The overall effect is a multiplying effect of the time experienced while inside the box. What I mean by a zero time state is that the environment within the box is one in which the actual field being produced inside is dislocated from the constraint of the standard arrow of time.
It is unbound, or as Abe put it, untethered to what you or I would consider the standard progression of time moving from past to present. Instead, the field inside the box swirls from past to present back to past and back to present again.
The trick is to exit once it has flipped back to past again. Carruth's idea of the box's operation was based on the Meissner effect, in which magnetic fields are expelled and the result is a current that doesn't weaken with time. It remains the same. This effect was extrapolated upon by Carruth to give the machine it's anomalous effect. It's actually said at the end of the movie, that boxes aren't one time use only. Am I the only person worried that we now have two Grangers in this timeline?
Because current-timeline-Granger is not going to get in the box since his daughter doesn't die in this timeline. Or did I see a body bag and that was from-the-future-Granger?
It is indeed concerning there are two Grangers now, but bear in mind the final timeline we see being set is from the perspective of Abe 2, who has returned to Monday of that week, before the Granger incident occurs.
Whether or not there will be another visiting Granger in the timeline he currently occupies remains to be seen, the prevailing theory seems to be that there will be. The reasoning behind this theory largely being that the party, Aaron's numerous trips back, the Granger incident and Abe 2's extended journey to the beginning of the week are all somehow connected. What the characters in the story have found themselves trapped in is what can most accurately be described as a feedback loop.
Like when a microphone is placed in front of a speaker. Given that the method of the machine's operation is contingent upon a fundamental premise, which is one of "what has happened is going to happen," because events, although still linked, are now in an un-sequenced format , every event that occurs impacted by a trip backward in time is an event that has occurred prior to its cause.
For example, if you turn on the box and you immediately emerge from that box, what that means is that it has been determined you are going to make that trip backward.
This also then means that whatever motivated you to make said trip will likely still occur as well, from a probabilistic standpoint. Otherwise, it is unlikely you would have any presence there at all. What Abe understood and Aarond did not was that in order to avoid becoming trapped within a feedback loop one must travel backward without being motivated by any one specific event, but to instead generally profit from the trip so that personal events are not pre-set.
This is why he insisted on maintaining strict symmetry, no tv, no phones, etc. This does not necessarily mean a timeline cannot be altered, but what it does mean is that whatever alteration you made to the timeline is now merely the result of a future action set to occur you are already experiencing the effects from, whether you are aware of it now or eventually will be later.
Feedback loops are Carruth's primary warning against the use of time travel. Well, I say prevailing theory because I felt it was seemingly obvious to most people that by the end of the film it becomes clear that the entire string of events are related in a non-linear causal format.
The very new yet still somehow mysteriously broken refrigerator in Aaron's kitchen at the beginning of the film, likely the result of a previous temporal generation of either Abe or Aaron using the copper tubing , Abe's initial introduction of the machine's function to a very impatient Aaron from an unknown and apparently relatively distant future, he is impatient because this is his umpteenth time experiencing it , the "leaks" in the boxes, likely the result of a future Abe tinkering with the boxes , Granger's inexplicable appearance, likely the result of a desperate future Abe sending him back to alert his past self to the degree in which things have spiraled out of control , and finally the appearance of Rachel's boyfriend at the party, who as we all now know was and always had been invited by an Aaron from the future.
Nothing is resolved, everything has simply been reset to its starting position. Feedback loop. I agree with nothing that you just said, particularly the likelihood of the things you claim to be likely. Just to pick the lowest-hanging fruit: the new refrigerator isn't missing any copper tubing, and that scene takes fully three months before the first time machine is constructed. Sam That's quite alright Sam, we don't have to agree. That's what makes the film so great, it's open to endless interpretation.
However, the refrigerator issue is difficult to ignore. You don't find it at all odd that Aaron's brand new refrigerator, we know it's new because it has a bow on it , is malfunctioning, malfunctioning by creating dirty ice, that Aaron and Abe later remove the copper tubing from Abe's not Aaron's broken refrigerator later in the movie, and dirty ice is sometimes caused by faulty or missing copper tubing that connects the water supply line to refrigerators?
I understand that it initially seems far-fetched, seeing as the opening scene takes place 3 months before the "first" machine is built. But what we are ignoring is that at the very end of the film, Aaron is building a much larger box, one the size of an entire room.
So we now have a giant box being created in March, perhaps even one that an individual could conceivably exit from long before the internal structure has been fully built so long as all of its doors have been closed the entire time leading up to someone going in and using it to build the internal structure , a broken refrigerator and an unknown number of Aarons and Abes roaming the Earth.
None of this is temporally connected? My question is why does Aaron find it necessary to record the conversations when he has lived through them? Also, if Aaron2 went back with the idea that he would record the conversations, why does Aaron3 attack him as Aaron2 would know that he would have to travel back [again] to listen to those conversations while they were happening in real-time? Aaron3 would be like, "Ok, dude.
Here I am. Things are going as planned. Give me the recording and do whatever it was we planned to do at the outset. That is why Abe turns on the failsafe machine Monday morning.
You can't travel back further in time to a point when the machine hasn't been invented. Just to expand on my response to above The strangest interpretation involves somebody who has decided that from the first scene they are already using the device to travel back. And that gets really odd. The way the boxes are set up you could never go back any further than the first moment the box is set up.
Haha, that is awesome. Do you have a URL for that interview? The remark about crushed ice at the start of the film is more about establishing scenery. We see some of the actually rather dull details of Aaron's family life, his daughter "She needs a bath". Later on we see the cereal he eats for breakfast always , and supermarket shopping, and filling up at the gas station.
The whole movie is set against this incredibly low-key, pedestrian suburban backdrop. The most interesting thing in Aaron's life is a crushed ice machine! You can see why the time machines would drop a bombshell on that. Something which is interesting, though, is the scene where they're filling up their cars and Aaron talks about "How did it get like this?
What have they done with their machines? How have they modified or controlled the world, to what advantage? It's clearly established that their boxes can't go back further than Monday.
But it might be that their entire world is the product of much earlier time travel by completely unseen people. This edges in to fan fiction but it's still a pretty neat thought.
Be it one time line or several time lines If one person stopped their previous self from getting in, all non primes of that person and timelines would cease to exist.
If that prime person never entered the boxes, there would be no event of new timelines being created. Billy: I suppose if Carruth said that, then you are indeed right and my proposed theory one of many is totally wrong and off base. I guess I tossed it out there based on two things, 1: a total lack of trust in anything the character of Aaron said or did in the movie, and 2: the fact that what a lot of people overlook is that it was actually he, Aaron, that first stabilized the machine and got it to work 3 months prior to Abe's first use of the box.
The feedback loop potentially being initiated by him tampering with a makeshift design and to his shock being confronted by an Aaron from the future, setting the events in motion.
But like I said, this must not be at all possible. Sam: That is an interesting point, I have had the same thought myself. Particularly when he said the line "What's worse, being paranoid or knowing you should be? This could have fueled his rationale to begin altering the universe himself, since from his perspective it's likely other people have already been doing it.
It would also be the only way in which what I proposed would be possible, if Aaron had hooked up with one of those individuals and was able to travel farther back. Cole: The reason the primes and timelines don't cease to exist is because once you've made a change akin to the one you're describing, preventing yourself from traveling, all that means is that you are now occupying a revised timeline.
It's easier to think of it in terms of a set of train tracks, and you are the train. When the train wants to go in a certain direction, the tracks are forked and the train diverts from the original path.
Those tracks still exist, but you are simply traveling down a diverted set of tracks. Interesting question: Could Abe have created a more effective failsafe option by doing the following: 1. Prior to informing Aaron of the discovery and prior to building any additional boxes, Abe Prime builds an original failsafe box which as I understand it, is basically what he does in the movie.
Instead of activating the timer and immediately leaving as is the generally accepted practice so as to avoid a future encounter with a double , Abe turns the box on and waits in the storage unit with a handgun. If some other version of himself exits the box, he kills that version of himself or really anyone else who exits the failsafe box.
Dispose of the body which should be doable since nobody would be looking for the victim - is it even a crime to kill your doppleganger from the future? Logistically, this would be difficult, but logically it could be done. Never tell anyone of the discovery and never create another box. Had he or anyone used the failsafe box at any point, he would know that building the time machines had created some sort of problem in the future. If nobody exits the box, it means that it is never used at any point in the future, and it can be assumed that by building the additional time machines, he does not create some sort of terrible dystopian future.
Granted, whomever travels back in the failsafe box could be armed. However, if it were someone else who travels back, they won't be expecting Abe Prime to ambush them.
And if its some future version of himself who wants to kill Abe Prime so as to assume his identity, they can have a shoot-out in the storage unit to see who gets to be the sole Abe. Again, the logistics would be a pain, but I believe the logic holds. Just a few quick things about Aaron's new refrigerator.
The dirty ice is caused by breaking in the new water filter. Just like using a brita, you get dust in the first few batches that you run through it.
It has nothing to do with being tampered with due to their experiments. The copper tubing holds the freeon and is in no way attached to the water line. Also, up until the most recent invention, these guys are working 's and have only been mildly successful in their garage company. They had to find outside funding for their major project.
So maybe it's in there to signify that buying a new refrigerator was a big deal and all that Aaron could have afforded. Until march, that is. One thing to try and explain the changing timelines and if things that can happen or not. I see it this way. A new timeline is created everytime someone or several people exit a box. It is a new timeline because there is a new version of that or those people. Every time line is independent. You don't change the past or the future, you just create a new timeline in which you can either make sure everything happen like the previous timeline you've experienced or change things.
It's like Einstein's theory on relativity. There is no absolute time. Time is a subjective notion, you don't have one omnipotent person that observes the general timeline. Each person lives their own timeline from their point of view. I had read several versions but this makes the most sense.
There, all time-jumps occur in the same continuum - whatever changes the time-traveler makes in the past have already occurred. Its simply impossible to change the timeline, since whatever changes you make have already been made. Events will unfold in such a way as to prevent the time-traveler from causing a paradox e. The one MONSTER exception to this occurs at the end is similar to the movie's 'failsafe' - after discovering the ill-effects time travel has on humanity, the travelers jump to the distant past and prevent time-travel from being invented in the first place.
They should have winked out of existence at that point, but sadly? I'm fascinated to see that this movie is still being discussed in such detail.
While I like this explanation more than others online, I think it overlooks a fundamental problem with the theory of time travel Caruth is advancing. It also overlooks Caruth's own explanation of the Granger incident. The idea of recursion and whatever it leads to—that informed a lot of the story, the idea of creating a feedback loop. This isn't really addressed in the film, but the reason Granger is unconcious is because he's suffering from recursion.
What I think happened is that Abe told Granger about the machine. This man who's been told by Abe about the machine uses the machine to come back and somehow has an interaction with Abe so that now Abe probably won't tell him about the machine and yet he still finds himself there. Without coming out and saying it, the film is built on the idea that these paradoxes are a way to understand things.
The universe is not going to explode or break down if you create a paradox. Whatever's going to break is probably going to be you. He can't be there if he prevents the event that sends him back; he is a paradox. Rather than getting "erased from existence" as in a movie like Back to the Future or Jumper, he gets struck into a coma.
The problem is that this explanation -- from the horse's mouth -- is disregarded by the final scenes. Aaron1 cannot have found and used the first failsafe box if he was drugged in the attic. Aaron2 should have fallen into a coma as soon as he got near Aaron1. Aaron3 should have been struck comatose at that moment. Caruth intended to use the Granger incident to show the effect of paradoxes using his operable theory of time travel; and as a catalyst for the films final scenes and big reveal.
Instead, it actually broke the coherence of his narrative. Although some of my theories have been enthusiastically demonstrated by others as being in conflict with Carruth's intended meanings in the film, his comments stated above regarding the Granger incident seem to be in line with what I have proposed in earlier comments. Also, if what he says is indeed true, and considering that the entire world of Primer spawned from his mind I think it's pretty safe to say it is , it would also strongly suggest that something did in fact happen to Rachel in an alternate timeline.
The reason I say this is because the only purpose Granger originally served Aaron and Abe was to finance the development of their project. Seeing as how they now possessed time machines and were instant billionaires, financing was no longer an issue. So why would Abe have any need to tell Granger about the machines? We know from the ensuing conversation between he and Aaron that it would have to be a serious emergency for him to do so, like if his daughter was murdered.
Carruth's explanation for Granger's presence essentially confirms that something tragic happened to Rachel in some iteration of reality, the same iteration that the farthest traveled Aaron originates from as well. If it were me, I would turn the box on one hour before a huge Powerball drawing. Then I'd wait around until the drawing, find out the winning numbers, then turn the box off and climb inside, then buy a ticket as soon as I get out.
RBM That would be a good idea, I've had similar thoughts myself. But in reality, if one had a machine such as that, money would no longer be of any consequence. All methods of making money rely upon the fundamental principle of time moving forward, once you could go backward there would be endless ways to make an instant fortune.
The power one would possess in having the ability to travel through time, and being the ONLY ones having this ability , would extend far beyond any level of power achievable through money. Indeed, they would ultimately have control over all things. I made the mistake of watching the film pissed at 2am.
I'll have to watch it again when I'm in a better state of mind. A couple comments. As some others have mentioned, the reason Abe Two alludes to protecting Kara and Lauren from Aaron Three is because Aaron Three suggested the possibility of making doubles of Kara and Lauren, and Abe Two doesn't want him to do this.
I'm in agreement with some other commenters that the new time machine being built at the very end is not the size of a warehouse. Aaron is clearly heard telling the workers, "Every half meter". As other commenters have suggested, this implies that he plans to build a warehouse full of time machines, rather than a warehouse-sized machine.
You state that it's Hooded Aaron, but is it really? At the airport, Aaron Three states his intention to steal Aaron Prime's passport and leave the country. Does the fact that the warehouse workers are speaking French indicate that it's Aaron Three building the new machine s , rather than Hooded Aaron? Personally i think the jury's out on that question, and i don't think it can be definitively stated which Aaron it is.
Mainly because of the nature of what we're trying to determine, I mean all three Aarons are the same person. It stands to reason that if not in contact with one another, they would all do the same things independently. So what happens if you bring a time machine that has been running for a week back in time with you through another time machine that had been running for a week? You turn machines A and B on at 6 am Monday morning.
On Friday morning at 6 am you travel back through machine A, bringing machine B with you. Now you're back at Monday morning, 6 am with a second time machine that has been running for a week.
What happens if you get inside machine B on Monday morning at 6 am? Trent : Essentially what you're describing is how Aaron used the failsafe machine to travel farther back than Abe.
He took a machine that had been turned on at the earliest point and took it back with him in his machine, opened it and traveled back to that point. What would happen in your scenario is that you would simply arrive back at 6 a. Monday, because that's when you first turned it on. Regardless of how long your machine has been running, machine B would have been running for 2 weeks btw , it will not take you farther back than the moment it first became operational, because there would be nothing to exit out of prior to that.
Also bear in mind, the minute the machine starts is the moment your double will exit it. So as soon as you started machines A and B at 6 a. How is it possible to relive the same day more than once without creating endless doubles?
How can Aaron redo the party 20 times?! There would be 20 Aaron's. This makes no sense, unless Aaron only did the party 3 times? But it is eluded that Abe and Aaron can easily retry days. Unless they kill there old selves and re get in the box themselves?! Michael : Aaron didn't exactly say he relived the part 20 times, he wondered out loud if that's how many times it would have taken to get it right. The film indicates that it took Aaron a total of 3 attempts to get the outcome of the party just right, according to his liking , with the original version of events at the party not having Aaron been there at all.
To answer your broader question, how can one relive the same day without endless doubles, that is at the heart of the dilemma with Carruth's time travel. The way it is SUPPOSED to work is that the traveler turns on the machine, leaves for the duration of time they wish to travel back, return to enter the box, wait in it for an equal amount of time and exit the box.
If the traveler does not interfere with the course of these events, then presumably his past double will do just as he did and vacate the timeline by entering their box, thereby leaving the earliest version of someone to remain.
Now, the way one winds up with doubles is by NOT sticking to this procedure and somehow interfering with their past double entering the box as they did, thus resulting in their displacement in the timeline. The reason there are several Aarons is because he kept rendering his doubles unconscious so he could deliberately alter events, thereby preventing them from entering their boxes and resulting in a multitude of Aarons.
Abe only has one double because he only interfered with one of his doubles. Jim Good stuff, thanks for the speedy response. Basically, if you want to attempt to alter events, you're going to wind up with a double you have to replace, as we have with Aaron x3 and Abe x2. So if we wanted to live the same day again and again and again, we'd have to keep stopping our past selves getting in the box and get in ourselves. Creating a double each time. Each double being slightly older than the previous.
Maybe the only logical and useful application for a time-machine would be to give it to lesser minds who would not be able to resist using it, for money, patents, and to be left to do without them weighing you down. Abe and Aaron are not the geniuses, they did contribute, but it was not their idea and not even a project they wished to be a part of to begin with, apparently these two had cost the other two in the past and their was a clear division in the company from the kitchen table discussion.
Also two different fridges- one at the beginning with the bow is black and has sides doors doesn't it? The second is white and has upper and bottom, I assumed it was someone elses fridge not Aaron's. Enjoyable article. I don't agree on every point, but it did open up a bunch of ideas to me.
It never occurred to me to think about the connection of the "noises in the attic. But that for me is a weakness of the film - I find it hard to buy that AaronPrime could be locked in an attic for four days. I have a question on a point I haven't heard anyone else mention - when the Granger incident takes place, I think it's pretty clear there are two people who get out of Granger's car. They are both out of focus so it's hard to see them, but one of them looks like it could easily be another Aaron.
This other person never seems to get mentioned or referred to by anyone. Anyone have any ideas? Hey all, wonderful movie which I just discovered a few hours ago and amazing threads and graphs explaining Carruth's time machine. I've got a question in order to better understand how it's working.
What would happen if Abe, before trying the machine the very first time say on oct , decided to turn on the machine at am, then hide with binoculars around 12pm kinda far away and then wait for his future self to come out while strictly adhering the following rule: "I'll always enter on oct at 6pm and on oct at 6pm only, unless I've seen my future-self come out"? Robert and Philip's work, the part Abe and Aaron were reluctant to become involved with, was centered around the creation of a rotating superconductive plate that they hoped would reduce the mass of any object that was placed on top of it.
Aaron and Abe found that idea too lofty and a waste of time ironically enough. They were more interested in working on a superconductor that could conduct at room temperature, something they felt would have been much more marketable and therefore profitable. As a compromise, they decided to integrate the two projects into one.
This is why when Aaron is demonstrating to Abe that the machine was stabilized Abe confirmed with him that he "only changed the box, the plate stays the same," because he wanted to ensure anything Aaron did to the box only pertained to their portion of the project and didn't affect Robert and Philip's. The machine they finally construct to use for time travel consists of their box and a web of Robert and Philip's tiny superconductive plates that work together to repel the magnetic fields generated by the box into its interior to create one intense field that is dislocated from the normal flow of time.
Anonymous : I am not sure but I think what you meant to say in your example was what would happen if Abe decided that he would enter at 6 p. If he had no intention of entering the box upon seeing himself exit it, then the probabilistic threshold would not be achieved and he wouldn't ever see himself exit if it meant he would never travel.
In order for the probabilistic threshold to be reached, events would have to configure in such a way that they would increase the likelihood of him entering the box in the first place. At least that's what I think. The other possibility would be that if he decided not to enter the box upon seeing himself exit, then he would simply be watching an Abe from a parallel timeline that wound up changing his mind and traveling anyway, resulting in a doubling of himself.
In any event, in terms of the actual story line of the film, had Abe decided to wait to see himself exit the storage unit on his first travel, he would have been surprised to instead see Aaron 3 exit it, as he is the one who winds up traveling the farthest back.
Great movie summary! I hope I didnt miss this in the posting or subsequent comments, but I noticed that when Abe is explaining the boxes to Aaron he he casually mentions "I, my double, or or someone is coming backwards".
Why would he use someone if only Aaron and Abe know about the boxes? Is he possibly referring to Granger? Why wouldn't Aaron notice the comment and ask why anyone else would be in the boxes? This may be a dumb question, but I was really struck by the sequence within the first fifteen minutes of the movie in which Abe wakes up on the floor of his bedroom completely disoriented.
The timing between the sound and the visuals is purposefully disjointed, Aaron repeats the time to him over the phone, and it seems to me that this happens somewhere in the relevant timeline so to speak, I know there are several of their time travels. What's going on here? It seems too intentional and too carefully crafted to be insignificant. An interesting detail we just noticed. When abe shows aaron the storage unit for the first time hr checks a lock on the unit just before it.
Or maybe he is just verifying it is locked. Anyways this could be a failsafe box or some other box. There's one thing I'm curious about that I haven't seen anyone address yet Everything that happens in Primer makes logical sense if one takes the trouble to work it out, but the feeling of disorientation it initially produces is intentional. Aaron and Abe decide to use their time machine to make a killing on the stock market, but when Aaron asks Abe who makes the first journey back—or does he?
All that matters is that the price will go up. The project truly does belong to Aaron and Abe, as they use all their free time working on it, primarily trying to overcome the many engineering related problems they've encountered. It is during one of his tests with the invention running that Abe discovers that a protein inside the main unit has multiplied much more rapidly than it could in nature.
Rather than the invention being a protein super incubator, Abe, using himself as a guinea pig, and a very meticulous one at that, discovers that the invention can be used as a time machine. In his self experiment, Abe was especially careful not to interfere with his own self in that time warp.
Abe passes along this discovery to Aaron, who he expects will tell his wife Kara in what is the sanctity of their marriage, but he doesn't want to tell either Robert or Phillip. Much to Abe's surprise, Aaron does not want to tell Kara, it being a sole intellectual property of just the two of them, in the process moving the base of operation to a locked storage unit.
Aaron's plan for the two of them is to use the invention to win big in the stock market by knowing through the time travel what has happened in the market. With two thoughts on the matter now instead of just one, Aaron and Abe may hit some logistical and philosophical roadblocks in how to move forward. If you always want what you can't have, what do you want when you can have anything? Rated PG for brief language. Did you know Edit. Most of the money was spent on film stock.
Goofs During numerous takes the director, Shane Carruth , mutters "cut" under his breath. According to the DVD commentary, this is due to their extremely low budget which did not allow them to "waste" film. Carruth notes that a total of 80 minutes of usable footage was shot; the final film is 78 minutes. Quotes Aaron : Man, are you hungry? Crazy credits Thanks to Scott Douglass for having the faith to invest in the final stages of marketing and post production.
Connections Edited into Hollywood Burn User reviews Review. Top review. No Maps for These Territories.
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