The weekend I watched 'Primer' 4 times and still got the timeline wrong

Last Saturday I sat down with my brother and a whiteboard to finally crack 'Primer' after hearing it's impossible. We mapped out every time jump on the board with colored markers, spent 6 hours on it, and ended up with a diagram that looked like a spaghetti explosion. By Sunday night we had three different theories that all contradicted each other, and my brother swore the movie had a hidden 5th timeline nobody talks about. Has anyone else gone cross-eyed trying to figure out that film's sequence of events?

1 comments

1 Comment

miller.jason8d ago

Heard a film professor once say 'Primer' is the only movie that gets time travel right because it treats it like a math problem instead of a fun ride, and I think that's really true. Your whiteboard spaghetti is basically the standard outcome for anyone who tries to track the loops, from what I understand. My buddy and I had a similar weekend where we realized one of the timelines only exists if you assume the earplugs scene happens in a specific order, and that's where things got messy. There's a popular theory online about the 'off-screen' days where characters might be making copies without the audience seeing, which totally blew my mind. Your brother might be onto something with that hidden 5th timeline, because the movie leaves so much unsaid that you can fill in almost any gap you want.