![]() Time travel is a messy business in Twelve Monkeys unreliable, disorientating, and utterly fascinating. James’ sanity (indeed, whether he’s even a time traveler at all) is an opened-ended question, with the movie only dropping the bare minimum to assure us that Cole probably is from the future, and the dystopic wasteland of 2035 is probably not just a paranoid delusion. Plus, it turns out that time travel isn’t easy on the mental faculties. On his first journey, James lands in 1990 - not 1996 - though all things considered, that’s an unqualified victory, seeing as other misfires have propelled travelers as far back as the Middle Ages. Worse still, it’s liable to drastically overshoot and land its occupant adrift in history. The time machine in this movie is the stuff of nightmares a mash of steel girders and dirty scaffolding the size of an aircraft hangar that requires a whole crew to operate. Humanity’s last hope lies with James Cole ( Bruce Willis) - a convict selected for a special mission to return to when the virus began in 1996 and bring a sample back to the future for the creation of a vaccine. In the year 2035, a deadly virus has wiped out most of the population, and survivors have been forced to live underground. As Aaron and Abe discover, time travel is ramshackle, scary, and very dangerous, and Primer’s take on it is so thoroughly unique as to be one of the coolest portrayals thereof that sci-fi has ever seen. Even the time machine’s name - unceremoniously referred to as "The Box" - acknowledges that there is nothing slick or stylish about this operation. Our protagonists are a pair of nerds who built their time machine between their day jobs, and it's every bit as clunky and unglamorous as that setup suggests. To say that Primer is complicated is an understatement, but that’s all a part of the film’s cool factor. ![]() Primer is a cerebral and anxiety-inducing demonstration of how time travel might function in real life - and even that results in deteriorating doppelgangers and alternate timelines galore. When entrepreneurs Aaron ( Shane Carruth) and Abe ( David Sullivan) accidentally invent a time machine in their garage, the exciting opportunities are as numerous as the unfathomable dangers of meddling with the space-time continuum.
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