Topic: primer

[beo]

anyone seen this? it's a bit art-house and could be considered pretentious, but if you can get past that, it's absolutely fantastic. it drip feeds you tiny snippets of information and leaves you to work out what the hell is going on. i don't want to talk about the plot, because that would ruin the fun, but if you want a bit of a mental workout, give it a go. it's science fiction of the highest order and an utter headfuck.

[Quemaqua]

Sounds fun to me!  I'll have to check it out.

[shock]

I'm bumping this because this is a great movie and I just watched it after reading the XKCD comic about it.

I definitely need to watch it again to get a better grasp of how the little things came together.. but a thought provoking film to say the least.

[ren]

great movie. Everybody I've introduced it to has loved it and watched it multiple times.

[TheOtherBelmont]

Awesome movie, I've watched it a couple of times.  I wish it was longer though.

[Schlotzky5]

Ive wanted to watch this movie for several years now. I watched it tonight and I cant wait to watch it again.

I do have a question for somebody who has seen the movie before.

(click to show/hide)

Who was the narrator? I am awful at matching up faces with voices. I want to watch this a couple more times and try to figure a little bit out on my own before I go all wikipedia and spoil the whole thing.

[Cobra951]

According to Wikipedia, Shane Carruth, who directs and plays Aaron.

Big

(click to show/hide)

It is revealed that the narrator of the movie is the Aaron who came back in the failsafe the first time, and that his "narration" is actually a message being left on Aaron's (the "original", who does not yet know about the time travel) answering machine.

Wikipedia

Edit:  I wanted to post an answer before going into this, because it may take a bit of time to write.  And time is the issue.  Yes, time is real.  It's as real as beauty, or love.  It is absolutely necessary for human comprehension of the universe.  It is required by all the math we have developed to track the mechanics of the universe.  It is nearly impossible to describe events without including time, directly or indirectly.  However, (and here lies my rub) I think time is purely abstract, a concept developed by, and then needed by, the human mind to facilitate comprehension.  We can no more manipulate time than we can climb obsession.  We can record events and play them back, creating a facsimile of the past.  We can look very far at events which happened years ago with a telescope.  We can slow down some processes, creating the illusion that time passes faster for what those processes control.  None of this manipulates time itself.  It can't.  Watching this movie should at least make one think about the absurdity of time travel.  Do you really believe that you exist as a separate entity each instant of time?  So there have already been an infinite number of Schlotzkys.  A millisecond after you were born, that would have already been true, if the math is taken as a direct reflection of reality.

I'll leave it at that, because I don't want to spoil the film for those yet to watch it.  I took it as I take all works involving time travel: a fantasy, with no chance of ever becoming anything else.  But it is extremely interesting and mindbending nevertheless.

[Schlotzky5]

So I watched this movie a couple more times, pieced together a little more then did a lot of reading. I am still trying to sort it all out, but I really love this movie.

I dont necessarily agree with you with your view on time, but I am a believer that time to us is just a simplified version. We come up with ways to understand it because in the grand scheme of things, we just arent that smart.

[Cobra951]

What we don't know eclipses what we do know.  But still, some things smack me as being so unlikely that I have to reject them outright.  The mind-numbingly convoluted theory of relativity makes me think of it as our modern-day heavenly spheres, attributed to Ptolemy.  The heavenly-spheres theory explains the movements of the solar system, and does a good job of predicting what will be where at different times too.  It is a complicated model where each planet revolves around 2 different centers, with the result being a corkscrew path in the heavens.  Copernicus is credited with a huge paradigm shift, and presto: way simpler mechanics explain and predict the movements.  The sun is at the center of the whole thing, not the Earth.

Two theories, both practical.  Which one is right?  The simpler one, a perfect illustration of Occam's razor.  So what is more likely, that we live in a literal 4-dimensional (at least) space-time continuum, with time being a physically real thing that can cause quasi-magical anomalies, or that we live in a much simpler universe, where we lack the understanding of some fundamental thing (like the solar system's center) which would simplify our modeling of it immensely?  For now, relativity is practical.  Let's stick to it when dealing with celestial mechanics.  In the absence of Copernicus, Ptolemy will have to do.

[Quemaqua]

Well said.

[scottws]

I must be the only person that didn't like this movie.  Don't get me wrong, I was gripped by it from beginning to end and it is definitely mind-bending, a thinkers movie.  Maybe I'm just not that deep a thinker?  I have no idea but I have no desire to see the movie again or learn anything more about it.  I do appreciate the approach used to make the movie and the fact they didn't try to dumb it down so that more people would understand what was going on.

[Schlotzky5]

You're not the only one. I told a bunch of my friends about it the weekend after I saw it and most of them who saw it go 'oh yeah, it was alright, I just didnt get it'. I tried to explain how part of the movie is that you're not supposed to get it, but it was no use. Its just not a movie for everyone.

[gpw11]

So, I finally watched this.  People were all like "You have to pay attention or it will confuse the hell out of you".  I mean, people said that about Inception, but those people were kind of dumb. I got three quarters of the way through this and was all like "What the fuck is everyone talking about"  BAM! Confused as shit in the blink of an eye.

I was also told that the creator said that it's not as open ended as it comes off and there's an actual sequence of events that you CAN figure out. I watched the last twenty min or so again and here's what I have:

(click to show/hide)

Two dudes create box that acts as a time machine. Turn box on, get in it later and you can slowly go back to the point in which the box got turned on, but never before (obviously).  Meanwhile, doing so creates an overlap of yourself and there are two versions of you running around until the point the first version of you (that turned the box on) gets into the box later, traveling back to the point where the second version of you got out of the box, extinguishing the overlap. Dudes build boxes, try to get rich while avoiding each other.

Dudes are having awesome adventures, decide that they want to go back and change an event, run into the VC guy who is now fucked from being in the box and can't figure out why he's there.  This is when shit gets fucked. It's revealed that Abe actually build three boxes, turning the failsafe box on far earlier than the two they've been using up until this point and stashing it in another storage locker. Since this was turned on earlier, he can use it go back in time further and prevent the Aaron and Abe from the original timeline from ever getting involved in time travel and avoiding the whole situation with the comatose VC guy. He attempts to do so.

The box travel is exhausting and when Abe goes to meet Aaron to alter the conversation where he first told him of the boxes (after he had gassed himself), he passes out.  And this is where shit gets really confusing and kind of convoluted. What I got:

-Aaron's headphones are replaying the recorded conversations from a previous timeline so that he doesn't deviate from it.  The goal?  Create a perfect timeline for his purpose without altering anything else.

-Aaron had discovered Abe's failsafe at some point.  He moved it and essentially took control of the box which has been on the longest, thus taking control of the entire time traveling situation. I got a bit confused here, but it seems that he actually also moved another box back in time with him, using the failsafe.  He uses that box to make a "fake failsafe" which Abe later uses.  Actually, the whole mechanics of this and why (beyond the simple "so Abe doesn't suspect") throws me off. It's kind of a cluster fuck, but Abe doesn't make it back as far as he would like.

-Aaron has been traveling back a lot. He drugs himself, takes over his own spot, and throws himself in the attic. Yet another Aaron shows up, they fight, and 2nd Aaron beats 3rd Aaron (presumably because 3rd Aaron had traveled back further).  They talk it out, one Aaron sticks around, the other disappears, and the third is in the attic. Which one stays and which goes doesn't really matter as we can probably assume that the conversation they had served the same purpose as having the third stick around - whatever was going to be done was going to be done.  This is confusing as fuck.  Especially because Aaron's motivations are never explained.

-Eventually Abe 2 and Aaron 2/3 (maybe more?) intersect at the point on the bench where Abe goes down.  That's the point things get really confusing because the narrative shoots through and explains some of the events above, really briefly. What we can assume is that Abe 2 and Aaron 2/3 are more or less on the same page at this point. Begrudgingly.

-They do their thing.  Aaron 2/3 disappears.  Aaron 1 gets out of the attic and resumes his normal life. Abe 2 sticks around and tries to prevent Abe 1 and Aaron 1 from building the machine (or using it further?  That would make more sense considering the timeline of the party).

Great.  But the things we don't see are probably the most important as I see it:

-After the building of the box, I don't think we've ever seen the "original timeline". After that point, we're probably seeing different variations of Aaron and possibly Abe (although it could still all be Abe 1 going through his first run).

-Something that happened in the original timeline provided Aaron with his motivation, but we never actually see it.  The weirdest part of the movie is why he's so caught up on this game, and that's the biggest indication that we haven't seen the original timeline. Chances are that Rachel died at the party, or at least SOMETHING bad happens with the shotgun toting guy. Hence Aaron's motivation to use the failsafe to go back, rather than just being a fucking weirdo.  And whatever it is, it takes more than one try to get right.

Of course, there are some pieces that don't fit or aren't explained as far as I can see it. The time traveling VC guy doesn't serve much purpose rather than to serve as a catalyst to Abe using the fail safe and discovering that Aaron has been hopping around and also that other timelines now exist. I'm sure, however, that there's a deeper meaning to this.  Likewise, the narrative phonecall from Aaron probably has more weight to it than just being a convenient explanation, and finally, the scene at the end with Aaron 2/3 in a foreign country building something (giant box?) must play in somehow.

That said, good movie, and surprisingly actually confusing as fuck the first viewing. 

[PyroMenace]

Man I watched this a long time ago... so I can't remember much and I started reading your synopsis gpw till I got to the middle of your second paragraph and I couldnt take much more.

All I remember of what I got out of it was that 2 guys invent a time machine, they go back to try and score some money, they fuck up some minor detail and they try to fix it only making things worse over and over again. Moral of the story... dont fuck with time.

[gpw11]

See, fuck, why couldn't I just look at it that way and have saved myself the twenty minutes of rewatching and hour (plus) of thinking about it*? Damn it.


*This is a trick question. Obviously, the answer is because people said it was confusing and I took it as a challenge because I'm an idiot.

[scottws]

I watched the movie a couple of times and got no where close to gpw11's conclusion.  The movie just blew my mind.

[Cools!]

Yeah, I really liked it as well. I tried to follow it, but lost it close to the end at which point I figured I got "it" enough to not bother understanding it completely (if that is even possible given how little information is given).

[gpw11]

Yeah, after reading the posts after mine here I figured I was probably crazy and looking into it too hard.  So, I started interneting.  Don't do that. I feel like a loser for spending an hour and a bit trying to figure it out...there are people who have been spending far, far longer, and everything just gets more confusing.

(click to show/hide)

I found a plot timeline of the movie.  You know how my speal above covers like 3 or 4 different timelines? This thing had fucking 9.