Overview
It’s the mid 21st century and time-travel hasn’t been invented yet. But it will be in 30 years. Joe (Joseph – the babe of Hollywood - Gordon-Levitt) works as a Looper, a hit man hired to execute targets sent back from the future where time-travel is under the dominion of organized crime. All goes swimmingly until one day his target is his own future self (Bruce – ‘I’m still here’ – Willis) and he fails to pull off the hit. Suddenly both versions of Joe are forced to go on the run - endangered by their previous employers - in order to save their future as they see it, culminating at the farm of single mother Sara (Emily Blunt) and her telekinetic son Cid (Peirce Gagnon).
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Review
‘Time travel s**t.’ This is how the Looper boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) summarises the film's most marketed characteristic. A sentiment echoed by balding Joe upon eating dinner with his freshly rhinoplastied younger self. ‘We could be here all day drawing diagrams with straws’ he says and from there there’s no turning back for Looper.
Looper is sci-fi done right. Clever and it knows it. But more importantly than that: clever and it’s good with it. This isn’t the sort of film that takes a complex idea – and has there been a theory more intellectually ruinous than time-travel in films? – and proceeds to spend its running time illustrating the complexity of the idea and it’s uniquely ingenious grasp of it. No. In Loopertime-travel is cool. Murderous maybe. And seemingly under the control of elusive omnipotent big-bad pseudonym ‘the Rainmaker’. But still damn cool. And this is no doubt largely down to one of Hollywood’s most exciting emerging double acts: director Rian Johnson and the industry’s man-of-the-hour Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Debuting with high-school based noir thriller Brick and following up with whimsical oddity The Brother’s Bloom, Johnson earned a deserved reputation as a convention-shirking auteur. Looper is no different. Its complicated subject matter is indeed complicated. More so even, the door for web-based speculation left well and truly open. But this doesn’t matter. Time-travel is, oddly enough, not important at all – ‘time travel s**t’ after all. What is important is the world the device of time-travel allows Johnson to craft.
Set in a post-economic-meltdown dystopia, Looper is an aesthetic smorgasbord of treats. Look, for example, at the steampunk weaponry, all gratifyingly chunky and timeless. The clash of fancy futuristic eye-drugs and old-as-the-hills secret safes. The juxtaposition of dilapidated cityscape and cosy yesteryear farmland; the home of single-mother Sara and her narrative-anchoring telekinetic son (telekinesis being another sci-fi staple delightfully subverted). Time-travel here is a device within the greater world and not the world itself. One of the most captivating scenes involves the future version of Joe’s friend Seth as he attempts to escape from Abe’s gloriously named Gat Men. Starting with never-before-seen scars appearing on his arm and progressing to harrowing mutilation as his younger self is operated on, the inherent complexities of time-travel are used to craft a gripping, original – and maybe a tad disturbing – scene. All with no intellectual waffle to get in the way too.
What’s perhaps most surprising however is that despite the slick action and clever concepts - present and accounted for in the bucket load – where this truly impresses is on the smaller scale. Dialogue is sharp and witty and characterisations are engaging, memorable and, most importantly, complete. Nothing, or should that be nobody, feels half-finished or vapid. Take Joe himself. While not necessarily the most likeable of protagonists - except this is Gordon-Levett…so maybe – he’s still such a robust, well-rounded and ‘real’ character that, regardless of his moral afflictions (which it seems come in similar bucket loads in later life), he is still an utterly captivating creation. Drug problems, mass-mudering and metal-hoarding aside: Joe is a cinematic entity that will hopefully live long in the memory.
Where the film comes unstuck however is when it’s inherent, abundant coolness obscures the emotional gravitas so necessary for narrative fulfillment. The key dilemma for Older Joe, the chief impetus for any empathetic connection with his baldy self, is that he wants to save the life of his wife. An admirable act and one rife with potential – gratifying - emotional depth and resolution. But this is unfortunately lost in the wake of the film’s eagerness to be – oh, that word – cool. The wife, while arguably the narrative trigger and emotional crux of the film, is sidelined to the point of barely existing, a veritable cardboard cutout. Willis has some undoubtedly badass scenes and does feel genuine following a mid-way 30 year montage depicting the transformation from young-and-angry to old-and-peaceful (sort of). But it’s overcooked, overplayed. Ultimately the two Joes feel too similar as the films seeks to demonstrate more of its seminal production design and action wizardry.
Ultimately, while there may be inconsistencies of style – the opening's voice-overs are strangely absent until the climax – and tone – there were laughs during what were, presumably, serious moments of the film – Looper is a landmark production. On top of pushing the boat in terms of intelligent sci-fi narrative and the scope for world-immersion, Looper forces brutally uncomfortable moral decisions upon its viewers to a degree never before seen in cinema. Culminating, during one scene, in a sequence no one will see coming.
Verdict
Looper is a testament to the idea that in the best time-travel films the actual notion of ‘time-travel’ really isn’t that important. Look to the likes of the Back to the Future series, a cultural behemoth, in which time-travel wasn’t so much a complex philosophical paradox but something totally bodacious, dude. Or, to put in another way, ‘time travel s**t’. While inconstancies may irk, they are forgivable in a film that sets a benchmark for modern sci-fi.
5/5
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