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Moon is the clear choice for me. Rockwell’s performance is undeniable. I think I like the idea of Primer more than the actual film. Granted it makes brilliant use of its limitations. It’s a great film. However, in a close race I think being the first Golden Brick winner has to count for something!
Moon is beautiful, an incredible character study, and centers around maybe my favorite Sam Rockwell performance, so it pains me a little bit to go with Primer here. Carruth’s first film is ambitious and smart, and he is an amazing directorial and musical talent. More importantly, it is a reminder of how great filmmaking can be done with a low budget and it remains a cinematic inspiration if nothing else.
It has to be Primer. Moon is a smart, confident movie but Primer's ambition elevates its workmanlike approach to well-trodden scifi material to be one of the greatest science fiction movies produced so far this century. The plot can be a bit incomprehensible, but Primer's strength is in the smaller moments that make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. It's also home to my favorite exposition sequence in almost any film - as Abe introduces Aaron and the audience step by agonizing step through his shocking discovery, culminating in a middle long distance shot of their dopplegangers walking away from their own eyes. It's one of my favorite twist moments in film.
Is anyone going to comment how the first ever Golden Brick winner was relegated to "Play In Status"? It's like Adam and Sam don't even care about their own awards.
Moscow, Russia
I watched both films for the first time for this Madness. My vote goes for Moon. Primer is a very interesting concept, but practically incomprehensible unless you probably give it another couple of watches. Man, I wish I had time for it! And I feel it's overcomplexity has nothing to do with very limited budget, but rather it's by the author design. Moon, on the contrary, is straight away entertainment, plus a great Sam Rockwell performance and some great sci-fi ideas.
Both these films were a couple of the primary thrusts into watching independent films in High School for me, awakening the cinephile hiding inside. I still love Moon and Rockwells performance is far above any in Primer. But I have seen Primer at least 5 times now, with fan-made commentary tracks and Shane Carruth's commentary (available on youtube). I even tracked down a Korean region release of the DVD so I could have a physical copy of it. So I had to go with Primer. I hope to see his follow-up Upstream Color, which remains solidly in my top 15, in the inevitable 2010s Filmspotting Madness.
While both films are fine updates to the sci-fi of ideas canon, I feel like PRIMER is both a spiritual stepchild in the Kubrick and Tarkovsky lineage -- the one I find most rewarding -- as well as a very singular take on the time travel conundrum that is as intellectually slippery as the concepts truly should demand.
While I like Moon, my vote firmly goes to Primer. Truly great sci-fi is about ideas, and Carruth applies knowledge from his mathematics degree about recursion (the method of solving a problem where the solution depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem) to the notion of time travel in a way no other film has dared come close to. And as someone studying for degrees in both film and computer science, I find Carruth's story of being a software engineer before scrounging $7000 make Primer and launch his film career truly inspirational.
I like both movies, with Duncan Jones' Moon being the more refined, much higher profile of the two. However, my vote has to go to Primer. I've only seen Moon once, and never really had the desire to revisit it. Primer, I've seen at least three times, and I've told all my friends about it, and I still get chills thinking about the implications that are brought up in its labyrinthine story. It doesn't matter that it was made for pennies on the dollar in comparison to Moon, and it shows. I haven't seen another Duncan Jones movie besides Warcraft (which I thought was underrated), and I haven't really needed to. I've seen both Shane Carruth movies multiple times and I have a mild anxiety over the fact that there hasn't been another to date. Primer wins.
Easy for me, I didn't enjoy primer. Think I should have watched it sober...
This is tough, but WARCRAFT aside, Duncan Jones has left a deeper mark on me as a filmmaker than Carruth, as much as I admire PRIMER. I also think that MOON is one of Sam Rockwell's best performances (though CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND is still my favorite). MOON it is.
Easily Moon. It's soo good, a clear 5/5. Sam Rockwell is wonderful. Primer is rubbish. Strange pairing in my opinion.
Monticello, AR
Hmm, my dilemma here is whether to allow my residual devout love for Shane Carruth's Upstream Color overwhelm the surprising and affecting surprises of Moon and Sam Rockwell's performance in that film? Perhaps I just need about 20 more viewings of Primer to untangle it's narrative loop-de-loops in order to properly appreciate it. My vote goes to Moon.
Arrgh! I love both of these so much! I ended up going with Moon because of Rockwell's performance.
Though both films prove you can do a lot with a little, I found Moon largely overrated while Primer is still underrated to this day.
I love, love, love Moon... and Primer didn't do much for me. There, I said it.
Kansas City, MO
This is tough. Primer handles the time travel aspect brilliantly, but I don't think it manages to fully overcome its budgetary limitations, unlike Carruth's other film, Upstream Color, which I hope gets consideration for the 2010s version of Madness. Moon is better in just about every aspect, except maybe the writing.
It pains me to vote against Moon, but I just have to give Primer all the love I can. When else have time travel and mumble-core come together, and so beautifully?
I and another technology journalist saw a press preview of this together before its release. We both had the same reaction: best handling of time travel we'd ever seen in a movie. I still think that's true. (Looper and Interstellar deserve mention, and as a U of Iowa grad I have a soft spot in my heart for Time After Time.)