Looper

Time Travel's a Real Bitch

Rian Johnson's Looper is a twisty, brilliant, masterfully constructed film that begins with a compellingly original plot, evolves into a complex character study, and concludes with an inexorable moral logic. It stars Joseph Gordon Levitt, who carried Johnson's freshman film Brick, and Bruce Willis, both playing the same character, just with thirty years of age difference.

Set in a dystopian future (2044 to be exact), where society seems to have devolved; where murder and theft don't seem to be as big of a deal as they are today; and where professional murderers, known as "loopers" operate without much trouble from the law. In fact, the law doesn't appear to exist (though I guess they do). Joseph Gordon Levitt is such a person: a looper. His job is to stand in a cornfield with a big gun, wait until a specific time, and dispatch the person who appears from nowhere before him. This person is actually coming from the future, where the mob uses time travel to dispose of bodies. If you send someone back in time to have them killed and disposed of, then they no longer exist in the future and all the evidence exists in the past. The looper is paid with bars of silver for their service. Just one catch. According to their contract, when the crime syndicates that employs these loopers decides to let them go, they send his older self back to be killed by the younger self. Because all of the victims are wearing hoods over their face when they're sent back, you don't know you're killing yourself until after you do it. After you kill your future self, you're then paid a handsome fee in gold bars, and you have thirty years to live until you'll find yourself going back to get shot.

The first question that crossed my mind about this scenario is: why would you take up such a job? As far as I know, nobody is forced to be a looper. It is a choice. Do these people not consider what it might be liked to know exactly how long you have to live? I imagine that knowledge must be dreadful to live with. Being a looper must pay awfully fancy for people to sign such a contract. Not to mention, it isn't a guarantee of thirty-years (as one critic pointed out might be an attractive benefit to the job). No. As clearly mentioned in the film, IF you are still alive in thirty years, you will then be sent back to close the loop. Essentially, no matter what, you have thirty (or less) years of life after you dispatch your elder self.

Anyway, from the trailers it is clear that the main conflict arises when Joseph Gordon Levitt fails to kill his older self. After this, he's on the run from his employers, because he's failed to close the loop. I don't wish to talk about the plot, as that is one of its great joys. More interesting to me is the inherent moral ambiguity raised in this film, particularly in later scenes which I shall not describe. Even more interesting are the philosophical themes. What would it be like to sit down in a diner with your older (or younger) self? Beyond that, what would it be like to sit down with your older/younger self when you were supposed to have killed or been killed by them?

Looper takes the elements of time travel as uses it not as a trick or spectacle, but to observe characters who are reacting to the result of time travel's existence. But, it doesn't hold back in having fun and exploring the possibilities of time travel's existence, and develops some that I have never seen in any other film. Consider a scene in which a man is brutally tortured, but we see not a drop of blood, not a shot of violence. If you haven't seen the film, I'll leave it to you to figure out how that's possible.

Is this film without its plot holes or paradoxes? Not one damn bit. I could list a great number of paradoxes or plot holes. Show me a time travel film where you can't. The Terminator (I & II), Back to the Future? Those are considered three of the best movies ever. And they're damn entertaining. So is Looper, but it also doesn't fail to not only engage on emotional, intellectual, and philosophical levels, but as well a visceral level. It's a superbly acted, technically solid, ingeniously written film that exhibits several levels of careful consideration.

****/****