---SPOILER ALERT---
I'm a lover of sci-fi, I'm an admirer of good acting, time travel ticks my boxes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of my favourite current actors and I am looking forward to seing Bruce Willis in another good movie! I'm sure I have said all of the above in seperate conversations over the last few years so I when I heard about Looper I lit up inside!
The premise is simple. Time travel hasn't been invented yet (2044). But in 30 years from now (then) "it will have been" and it will be immediately owtlawed due to its obvious temporal implications. But in a corrupt world something that powerful could never be kept behind a locked door, unused. Someone is bound to use it for gain, and in Looper we learn that the future mobs use it as a way to dispose of bodies since it has become increasingly difficult to do so undeteted. They bound up and bag up their faces, send them back in time 30 years to a "Looper" who then executes them and disposes of their body. The real bummer is that when a future mob boss wants to terminate a looper's contract he simply sends his future self back to himself for termination and "closes the loop" as a kind of housekeeping task designed to stop too many people knowing too much. Failure to carry out an assassination means you will be hunted down and killed by the rest of the team, led here by Abe, (Jeff Daniels) a mob leader sent back in time to employ the loopers.
So the obvious question going forward is one of what you would do when you are face to face with your own future self and your orders are to shoot on site. Which is exactly what happens to our main protagonist Joe played by a strangely unfamiliar looking Joseph Gordon-levitt. I say strange because his makeup is designed to restructure the top haf of his face in an attempt, I presume, to make him look like a younger Bruce Willis, who plays a Joe 30 years on.
Older Joe escapes termination and has an agenda of his own, to terminate a younger version of the new mob leader (in the future) who is closing the loops of all "loopers" and has also murdered his girl in the process. The idea is that the new mob leader, known as "The Rainmaker," will not grow up to hunt Joe down, kill his lover and end his happy life. But younger Joe has ideas of his own and plans to kill his future self in order to stay alive in the now. Bruce plays a very Terminator-esque role, going from door to door of three possible "Rainmaker" kids but then again, who doesnt like The Terminator.
I have to mention that one of the best performances comes from the child who plays the young Rainmaker (Pierce Gagnon). He goes from cute little boy to evil monster in seconds, rivalled in my memory only by the scene in Gangs of New York where Daniel Day-Lewis' character turns from sobbing wreck into serious gangster mode in at most 2 seconds. The kids pure evil eyes are something I will remember for a long time and also remind me of Tony Montana's "I'm angry and I'm gonna kill you for touching my sister" face.
What I enjoyed about this film is that there is no newbie character built in to help explain the deeper meanings of the science behind the movie. In the first Matrix it was Neo himself and in Inception it was Ellen Page's character but those movies were focussing on the science and here, Looper ignores all that and focusses on the "What If" and human aspects, choosing not to get bogged down in the mind-blowing side. In fact even the characters cant be arsed with it sometimes, most memorably my favourite lines are when old Joe tells young Joe "I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws" and when Abe explains "This time travel crap, just fries your brain like an egg"
There are more surprises I won't mention here but they do help add to the exciting futuristic science and human evolution aspect you might be hoping for, but they are really just eye candy devices to keep the less mature audiences involved.
Overall this movie can't surpass Dark Knight Rises for my favourite movie of the year, but it feels refreshing and rewarding as long as you go in not expecting too much science and exciting future stuff. Its comes down human instincts and the idea of nature vs nurture. Yes, there are some logic flaws and yes there are questions left unanswered about the science but by the end of the movie you just dont care because you enjoyed the ride and we get the important resolutions (for now??). There is certainly room for a sequel but I hope that Rian Johnson moves on to bigger things and uses this movie as a well earned kickstarter towards "Nolan Heights". I for one will be keeping a keen eye on his progress (and brief back catalogue).
Overall score 8/10
I'm a lover of sci-fi, I'm an admirer of good acting, time travel ticks my boxes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of my favourite current actors and I am looking forward to seing Bruce Willis in another good movie! I'm sure I have said all of the above in seperate conversations over the last few years so I when I heard about Looper I lit up inside!
The premise is simple. Time travel hasn't been invented yet (2044). But in 30 years from now (then) "it will have been" and it will be immediately owtlawed due to its obvious temporal implications. But in a corrupt world something that powerful could never be kept behind a locked door, unused. Someone is bound to use it for gain, and in Looper we learn that the future mobs use it as a way to dispose of bodies since it has become increasingly difficult to do so undeteted. They bound up and bag up their faces, send them back in time 30 years to a "Looper" who then executes them and disposes of their body. The real bummer is that when a future mob boss wants to terminate a looper's contract he simply sends his future self back to himself for termination and "closes the loop" as a kind of housekeeping task designed to stop too many people knowing too much. Failure to carry out an assassination means you will be hunted down and killed by the rest of the team, led here by Abe, (Jeff Daniels) a mob leader sent back in time to employ the loopers.
So the obvious question going forward is one of what you would do when you are face to face with your own future self and your orders are to shoot on site. Which is exactly what happens to our main protagonist Joe played by a strangely unfamiliar looking Joseph Gordon-levitt. I say strange because his makeup is designed to restructure the top haf of his face in an attempt, I presume, to make him look like a younger Bruce Willis, who plays a Joe 30 years on.
Older Joe escapes termination and has an agenda of his own, to terminate a younger version of the new mob leader (in the future) who is closing the loops of all "loopers" and has also murdered his girl in the process. The idea is that the new mob leader, known as "The Rainmaker," will not grow up to hunt Joe down, kill his lover and end his happy life. But younger Joe has ideas of his own and plans to kill his future self in order to stay alive in the now. Bruce plays a very Terminator-esque role, going from door to door of three possible "Rainmaker" kids but then again, who doesnt like The Terminator.
I have to mention that one of the best performances comes from the child who plays the young Rainmaker (Pierce Gagnon). He goes from cute little boy to evil monster in seconds, rivalled in my memory only by the scene in Gangs of New York where Daniel Day-Lewis' character turns from sobbing wreck into serious gangster mode in at most 2 seconds. The kids pure evil eyes are something I will remember for a long time and also remind me of Tony Montana's "I'm angry and I'm gonna kill you for touching my sister" face.
What I enjoyed about this film is that there is no newbie character built in to help explain the deeper meanings of the science behind the movie. In the first Matrix it was Neo himself and in Inception it was Ellen Page's character but those movies were focussing on the science and here, Looper ignores all that and focusses on the "What If" and human aspects, choosing not to get bogged down in the mind-blowing side. In fact even the characters cant be arsed with it sometimes, most memorably my favourite lines are when old Joe tells young Joe "I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws" and when Abe explains "This time travel crap, just fries your brain like an egg"
There are more surprises I won't mention here but they do help add to the exciting futuristic science and human evolution aspect you might be hoping for, but they are really just eye candy devices to keep the less mature audiences involved.
Overall this movie can't surpass Dark Knight Rises for my favourite movie of the year, but it feels refreshing and rewarding as long as you go in not expecting too much science and exciting future stuff. Its comes down human instincts and the idea of nature vs nurture. Yes, there are some logic flaws and yes there are questions left unanswered about the science but by the end of the movie you just dont care because you enjoyed the ride and we get the important resolutions (for now??). There is certainly room for a sequel but I hope that Rian Johnson moves on to bigger things and uses this movie as a well earned kickstarter towards "Nolan Heights". I for one will be keeping a keen eye on his progress (and brief back catalogue).
Overall score 8/10
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