Looper (2012)
Directed by: Rian Johnson
Premise: In the near future, time travel is used by organized crime to send victims to the past where they are killed and disposed of. The assassins, known as loopers, eventually end up executing their future selves in order to conceal the operation. When an assassin (Joseph Gordon Levitt) faces his older self (Bruce Willis), the older man goes on the run and leads his younger self in a pursuit that upends the entire operation and the future of organized crime.
What Works: Looper is a
smart and well-made science fiction film that manages to be as
intelligent as it is entertaining. This is a high concept movie but the
filmmakers have thought their premise through and matched the novelty
of the idea with characters and a story that are equally engaging. Most
of the best science fiction films are idea driven and pictures like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Videodrome play out like dramatic thought experiments. Looper
has been made with the same kind of intellectual earnestness and the
filmmakers use the time travel premise to raise very interesting
questions about personal responsibility and ideas about free will. The
filmmakers consistently invoke images and scenarios of cyclical
systems; in this story the loopers are well-rewarded for their services
and the film depicts a subculture of the loopers in which they work by
day and spend their earnings by night until one day they are to be
sent back in time and killed by their own hand. This idea of
self-destructive cycles is echoed throughout the film in other plot
points and set pieces and what Looper suggests about human
nature is rather dark but the film also offers moments of clarity that
make this more than just another sci-fi shoot-em-up. Aside from its
thematic content, Looper is also a very well designed
production. It takes place in the near future in which urban communities
have decayed and are replete with poverty, drug use, and prostitution.
The dystopian future is nothing new but the depiction of that future
in Looper is done on a credible scale. The problem with the
design and art direction of a lot of science fiction films is that they
are overdone; the future of Looper is one that is recognizable and that helps sell the illusion of this film. The final element that makes Looper
work is its characters and the performances of the lead actors. Joseph
Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis play younger and older versions of the
same man and Levitt does a great job imitating Willis, picking up on
some of the older man’s nuances and delivery. Bruce Willis is not an
actor with a wide range but he does a certain kind of role very well
and his performance in Looper is easily one of his best in many years, including his performance in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Looper
also has impressive supporting performances by Noah Segan and Paul
Dano as a pair of loopers and Emily Blunt as a single mother of a
peculiar child. These roles often subvert action movie clichés, with
Segan and Dano upending the role of the familiar stone cold assassin
and Blunt giving a textured performance as a weathered woman that
recalls similar female roles in movie Westerns.
What Doesn’t: There are elements of Looper
that don’t make a whole lot of sense if you think about them too hard
but that is the case in every movie about time travel. In the case of Looper,
the premise of the film describes a future in which murder is almost
impossible to commit but somehow a time travel assassination scheme is
perfectly plausible. This idea is absurd, especially since it isn’t
explained further, but because it is part of the assumption at the
start of the film it is much more passable than if the plot tried to
introduce it in the midst of the story.
Bottom Line: Looper is a well-made film and one of the better science fiction movies to be released in some time. It is too soon to say if this is a classic but it is a worthy descendant of movies like Blade Runner and The Terminator.
Episode: #413 (November 4, 2012)