Yes, I realized I haven’t posted any of my One Word Movie Reviews since I introduced the idea; in hindsight, I considered it a stupid idea. That is, until I saw the movie Primer. So here is the review:
Huh?
Make sure you print this out before you sit down to watch the movie so you can refer to it. Trust me.
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I know this is old, but that timeline, for anyone who might be just getting around to this post so long after it is posted, has one really big error in it that misses one really big point.
SPOILERS FOLLOW, obviously.
The timeline is mostly accurate, but it shows Aaron failsafing (i.e. going back to Sunday, to get the jump on things) twice. He only does this once, the first time.
We do *see* the results of this twice – the first and second times we see the parkbench scene. But (this is the important bit) those events are the same event for Aaron – that is, a specific version of Aaron is at the parkbench, and a specific version of Abe comes up and talks to him… then later, ABE failsafes, comes to the bench again, and the *same* Aaron, who (at this point in ‘time’) hasn’t yet experienced what we saw the first time, is sitting there. By failsafing, Abe “rewound the tape”, so to speak, to before Aaron had experienced that first in-film parkbench scene.
Of course that’s when it starts getting REALLY weird, as we discover that the Aaron on the parkbench HAD gone through the events once before, AND executed the Wednesday-afternoon failsafe that he DID do, but we never see any of that in the movie, it’s only spoken of in the voiceovers and flashbacks.
After the Granger incident, the timeline graphic shows Abe failsafing back to the beginning, and Aaron failsafing back even farther, ‘looping’ around Abe’s efforts. But there isn’t anything in the film that even implies that Aaron made that second failsafe… it is his *first* failsafe that loops around Abe’s, which makes it so Abe’s attempt to rewind the tape can only go so far… Aaron is always ahead of him. And Aaron knows this, so there is no reason for him to failsafe a second time… he lets Abe do it, that whole timeline essentially disappears everywhere except for in Abe’s memory, and a very tired Abe shows up at the exact same scene we saw earlier… only this time he is too tired to keep track of things, goes off-script, and when Aaron *doesn’t* go off-script Abe, Aaron, and we viewers all learn at the same time that nothing we’ve seen has been what we thought it was.
So the top red loop doesn’t exist. You could take Aaron’s actual failsafe, the lower red loop back from Wednesday, and stretch it upward to “loop over” Abe’s failsafe, if that’s the point you want to make. Or you could ignore it, since it’s years old. (But that’s actually the problem – Google never forgets, and this came up in a conversation today (26 May 2011) when two people were looking at different timelines and one of them kept talking about “Aaron’s second failsafe” and everyone else was wondering what they were talking about. “Huh?” indeed.