So why bother? I'm honestly curious. What's the attraction? 'cuz for a crap film it sure has a bunch of zealots defending it.

One bit that tickled me in a happy way about it was the characters. They aren't written to be badasses, they aren't written to be geniuses, they aren't written to be showy with their language.

They are written as any silicon techie talks. As characters with their mind solely focused on a problem and in tune with each others' vocabulary and thought trains.

I can't think of any other other movie with that writing style, though admittedly I'm not a guru of all movies nerd. It's not exactly THE KILLER FEATURE OF FILM, but it's little elements like that that make the movie stick out in my mind.

Also, plenty of good movies aren't perfectly comprehensible the first time. It took me multiple watches of The Thing to figure out who exactly was infected as the movie progressed. Admittedly, Primer feels like a montage through different timelines after a certain point, and the ending is far less satsifying and obscure than it could have been, but a movie doesn't have to be impeccable to be interesting.