OK sorry for the bad steer. The netflix reviews are about evenly
divided between people who think the movie is great, and people
who think the movie is terrible. For those who get obsessed with
it, the director put up a website discussion group. My comments
are under the name "dataspel" of course.
http://primermovie.com
Here is a brief review of the first 20 minutes or so:
A team of young engineers spend their free time trying to build
something cool that will attract venture capital. They are well
on the way towards building a room-temperature superconductor
when they find it has an unexpected side effect - objects placed
in the machine become untethered from time. The machine is
anchored in time at the startup (A) and shutdown (B) points, but
anything inside the machine is free to drift in either direction.
One of the guys figures this out and builds a larger box,
that he can enter at the B end (shutdown), and exit it at the A end
(startup), 6 hours earlier.
So the basic scenario works likes this:
1. Sart the machine
2. Drive to a hotel and spend the day there, so when your double
comes back in time, you won't interfere.
3. At the end of the day, call your stockbroker and find a stock
that went way up in price.
4. Drive back to the machine and turn it off. As it winds down,
get into the machine.
5. Wait 6 hours in the machine and exit that morning, just after
you turned it on.
6. Go buy some stocks. Do whatever else you want because your
double is in the hotel, and in a few hours he will enter the machine
and disappear from your timeline.
But of course there are other things you can try. The movie
explores some of those things and what happens to the guys
as a result. What I liked about the movie, besides the engineer
characters who were very familiar types from work, was that
the writer thought out the effects of each time trip in detail.
It does get hard to follow, but it is also an interesting puzzle
to solve, if you are so inclined.