Time Travel is a tricky topic. It’s one of those crippling ideas that if you wonder about for too long, it’s hard to focus on anything else. Movies that decide to make time travel their subject material have to balance on a thin line, using the concept effectively to contribute to the movie but not creating too many paradoxes that take viewers out of the experience.
Looper, directed by Rian Johnson, is a film that aims to do just that. In terms of sci-fi, Looper isn’t incredibly sophisticated but the film probes your brain enough to keep you thinking while the shootouts and explosions hold your attention.
The concept alone should be enough to make your head spin.
In the near-future of 2044, time travel has not yet been invented but soon will be. In the future, time travel will be created and outlawed shortly thereafter.
As a result, the only people who use time travel are criminal organizations that frequently need bodies disposed of. The future has created ID tags for each individual person, which makes it difficult to kill somebody. To circumvent ID tags, the mob sends targets back into the past to be killed by hitmen called “loopers.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as the character Joe, a looper. One eventful day, Joe is sitting in a cornfield about to kill his target when he recognizes the person he has been asked to kill: himself, but thirty years older (played by Bruce Willis). What happens next is the bulk of the film’s story.
With all this in mind it should be no surprise that the writing of Looper is easily the strongest asset of the film. The subject material can make it very easy for viewers to get lost but the film never wastes your time.
The first act of the film introduces all the concepts of the world of Looper. Information is dealt out at a rapid pace and the dialogue for explaining time-travel concepts is condensed to make every plot point easy to understand. You won’t get lost in the complexity or be left unattended long enough to wonder how everything works.
It also helps that the concepts of Looper are straight-up cool.
For example: people from the future can be affected by their past selves. At one point in the film, Joe needs to contact Old Joe. His solution to the problem is to permanently scar his arm with a message so that Old Joe will see the scar next time he looks down. It’s a little disgusting, but a very creative way of using time-travel tropes.
If the concept of Looper doesn’t grab you, the starring cast certainly will. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has made a name for himself in the past few years with films such as (500) Days of Summer, Inception and The Dark Knight Rises but he’s at his best in this film.
His character is supposed to morph into Bruce Willis at some point in his life, which is hard to think about since Levitt has a tiny frame and pretty face whereas Willis is a large man with a rough face. This is where Levitt’s acting ability really shines.
He adopts the mannerisms and speech patterns that Willis naturally has, which makes the comparison between the two very convincing. There were moments in the film where I had the thought of “he really looks like Bruce Willis in this scene.” It’s an impressive performance.
As for the man himself, Willis contributes to the movie by being himself. I’ve never really thought of Willis as a phenomenal actor but there are things he can do that wouldn’t be allowed in another movie.
For example: at one point, Old Joe starts a scene in handcuffs and 20 seconds later he has killed a room full of six people. The next scene is Old Joe massacring 30-or-so bad guys with extreme prejudice.
If it was any other actor on screen, you might think “this seems really unlikely,” but it’s Bruce ****ing Willis, he’s killed more people than the Iraq War.
Out of the entire cast, the most notable actor is easily Pierce Gagnon. If you’ve never heard of him it’s probably because he’s 10-years-old.
His character is a kid that’s assumed to eventually become the equivalent of future-Hitler. He’s technically one of three possible kids, but it’s pretty apparent from his first scene on screen that there is something inherently sinister about him.
They either found a really good child actor or a child who is mentally disturbed and used it to their benefit. It’s the type of performance that might scare you away from having children once you see how completely insane and vindictive they can be.
The film’s strengths greatly outweigh any faults it has but there are a few strange decisions made for the story that keep it from being perfect. Most notably is the strange pace of the plot.
The introduction is very high-paced and keeps you on your toes, but once Old Joe is introduced it’s almost like the movie hit reset and starts again. A few minutes later, two more characters are introduced and the movie restarts again. This allows the film to tackle several different topics for the story, but it’s a little jarring and very unexpected.
Along with that is the reversal of where the film takes place. Yes, the film still takes place in the future, but it’s not the cityscapes you might have seen in trailers.
Most of the movie takes place on a farm. Once the farm is introduced, the pace slows down and becomes more methodical. It’s not necessarily a negative against the movie, but I doubt many people were expecting a sci-fi movie about time travel to take place on a farm.
These are small nit-picks compared to everything the film gets right. Looper is one of those rare films that have the ability to keep you guessing. Its premise allows for storybeats that aren’t typical to the sci-fi genre and evades the possibility of veteran moviegoers predicting what will happen next.
It’ll likely develop a cult following of avid fans who love everything about while the most other people probably won’t be bothered enough to read this entire review.