Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004) is infamous for being one of the most complex time travel films ever made. Its budget was tiny, its cast largely nonprofessional, and its aesthetic stripped of Hollywood gloss. Yet it has become a cult classic precisely because it treats time travel not as spectacle, but as a messy, improvised engineering accident, one that corrodes friendships, multiplies ethical dilemmas, and fractures identity. Rather than pausing to explain itself in simple terms, the film drops viewers directly into the minds and conversations of engineers who discover more power than they are prepared to handle. On the surface, the plot is straightforward enough. Aaron and Abe are two engineers who spend their days at corporate jobs and their nights in a garage, building devices in hopes of launching a startup. While experimenting with reducing an object’s weight, they accidentally discover that a sealed box allows time to behave strangely inside. An object placed in the box experien...