Wowzers! Here is a fun one.
Looper is not just the
most stupendously awesome thrill-a-minute joyride of the year, it’s also a
rally cry that science fiction is still a sophisticated genre with plenty more
to say. We may have a robot the size of a car on Mars, but don’t think we’ve
tapped the genre out yet.
Moviegoers spent several years on a downward plunge with George
Lucas and his green-screen nightmares, but then came a bona-fide sci-fi
renaissance: Minority Report, District 9, Moon, Children of Men, Avatar, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Wall-E, Prometheus, Inception and now Looper, a dazzler about time travel, (very) organized crime and killing
children before they grow up to be adult monsters.
The movie takes place in 2044 in a sinister version of the United States , where even Kansas looks like an impoverished favela. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an
assassin of sorts. He shows up to a clearing in a cornfield and waits for bound
men to materialize out of thin air and then he kills them with a blunderbuss, a
shotgun that looks more like a table leg than a gun. The men are delivered to
him via time travel that is invented 30 years in the future. It is promptly
banned, but mob groups take control of the technology and start using it to
send people back in time so their bodies can’t be found. (With as much murder
as there is in 2044, though, I can’t imagine 2074 being somehow less
body-friendly.)
Joe is your average looper. He murders all day, then he collects
his silver-bar paycheck so he can party all night with prostitutes and drip a
potent narcotic from an eyedropper into his retinas. Folks, this is our hero: a
murdering, drug-abusing john. Joe’s living like there’s no tomorrow, because there
is none. When loopers sign up for the job they agree that one day they will
eventually kill a future version of themselves. This is called “closing the
loop,” and it means it’s the last day of work for the looper, who then retires
for 30 years until he’s bound up and sent back in time to be eliminated by
himself. Loops are closed to prevent too many witnesses from existing at the
same time.
This is not hard science. Not like Primer and its endless computations and labyrinthine flowcharts
required to understand its time-traveling plot. Looper is more about ideas — think of a time-traveling Inception — including how we live for
today, not for tomorrow. It also makes a very compelling case for and against
pre-emptive murder. For instance, if you could stand over Baby Hitler’s crib,
what would you do? In 50 years he’ll bring the world to its knees and bring
about the deaths of millions. But today he’s a baby, completely innocent and
defenseless. I invoke Hitler’s name aware of its weight and magnitude, and because
it’s that name that is usually brought up in these philosophical games of
what-if. Everyone likes to think they would end World War II before it starts,
but could a soul survive the act of killing a baby?
These ideas are the undercurrent of Looper, but that suggests it feels like a lecture or homework. Not
the case. It is full-on action, suspense and thrills so unique I found myself
unable to predict a single thing that happened next. In one sequence more
horrifying than most horror films, we watch as a man’s fingers, arms and legs
disappear as he scrambles to save his younger self. We never see where his
limbs go, but the implication is dreadful.
Joe, the man with the plan, finds all his plans are ruined when
his future self (played by Bruce Willis) turns up in that cornfield. Younger
Joe can’t kill Older Joe, so the two hash things out over breakfast — wouldn’t
you know it, they take their eggs the same way. Older Joe says things are bad
in the future, so he’s here to set things right by killing the child that will
one day become the Rainmaker, the fearsome new boss in 2074. This jets Looper off in exciting new directions
involving rocket-bikes, telekinetic powers, a deceptively cute toddler version
of the Rainmaker and his protective mother (Emily Blunt).
The movie has holes, but all time travel movies do. Even the
great Back to the Future, with its
fat-free watered-down version of time travel, had holes. My only real problem
with the movie was Gordon-Levitt’s prosthetic face, which he wears the whole
movie to make him look more like Bruce Willis. It looks, quite simply,
ridiculous. I wanted to see the real Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose actual face is
more than acceptable as a younger Bruce Willis. Worst of all, the makeup didn’t
make him look like young Bruce Willis, but a young Robert Forster (Jackie Brown).
That aside, all I can really do is gush about Looper and its trippy sci-fi plot and
its inventive stunts. I loved Gordon-Levitt’s action-heavy performance, and I
think he would make a solid action star, especially since he can convey
character depth better than most. I also enjoyed Willis who has a
“yippee-kay-yay” moment that is so good it wouldn’t be admitted into a Die Hard movie.
The movie is written and directed by Rian Johnson, who last did
the quirky-fun Brothers Bloom, and
before that directed Gordon-Levitt in Brick,
one of the most innovative film noirs to come out of the 85-year-old genre. Looper has its own noir elements to it,
but it never strays far from hardcore sci-fi like another noir-future movie, Blade Runner. The last time I was this
excited about a talented young director it was Christopher Nolan; keep your
eyes on Rian Johnson.
Ray Bradbury may be dead and the space shuttles may be retired,
but our complicated relationship with the unknown future is still producing
epic storytelling moments in Hollywood .
Looper is one of them.
