by Brett Parker
Looper is the first sci-fi film I’ve seen in many a moon in which the story trumps any special effects shots, actions scenes, or otherworldly art direction such a genre tale has to offer. I consider this a great blessing, seeing as how Len Wiseman’s atrocious Total Recall remake put a serious dent on my faith in the genre. Director Rian Johnson once again takes a dangerous movie environment and turns it on its ear, this time delivering his most assured and significant work yet. He brings his sense of playfulness to a time travel plot that never gets confusing nor diminishes the dramatic impact of the story. Inspired by The Terminator, Looper knows how to make mood and poignant emotions more important than the metaphysics.
Looper imagines a future in which time travel has been invented, but its illegal due to the fate-tampering damage it could cause. Yet in the year 2074, criminal organizations secretly use time travel to dispose of people they want eliminated. Since bodies are harder to dispose of in the future, mobsters send their targets back 30 years into the past where a team of specialized assassins known as loopers are assigned to shoot these targets and leave no trace behind. We follow a looper in 2044 named Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he blasts away his futuristic quarries who appear out of thin air and gets overly-compensated for his efforts. The mobs of the future always send back plenty of silver with their targets, and these rewards allow Joe to indulge in clubs, drugs, and hookers when he’s not murdering hooded undesirables.
One day, as Joe prepares to kill his latest victim, he discovers that his latest time traveler victim is a future version of himself. This Older Joe (Bruce Willis) knows exactly what he’s up against, so he uses his intelligence and ferocious fighting skills to escape Young Joe’s gun. Loopers are supposed to kill their targets even if they are, in fact, their future selves, and the fact that Old Joe is on the run causes Young Joe to be wanted by the very organization that employs him. Young Joe simply wants to get rid of his older self so he can stay alive and get back to his normal life, but Old Joe catches up with him and informs him that a dangerous criminal known as the Rainmaker will bring great harm into their life, and he believes he can track down the adolescent Rainmaker in Young Joe’s present and kill him. A battle of wits ensue between both Joes as they try to satisfy their own desperate needs, with Young Joe finding shelter from a country girl named Sara (Emily Blunt) and her young son Cid (Pierce Gagnon) while Old Joe tries to hunt down youngsters who fit the description of a young Rainmaker.
Rian Johnson is a filmmaker who likes to bring unexpected flourishes to film noir tales. His Brick brought a hard-boiled detective story to a high school setting while The Brothers Bloom saw him bringing quirky whimsy and yearning romance to a con artist game. With Looper, he lets snappy time travel complications run amok in a future dystopia. While most noir tales tend to focus on hoods, degenerates, and amoral everymen totally engrained in the darkness, Johnson focuses on broken people detached from and despairing of their sad worlds. What his protagonists have in common is a yearning to leave their harsh environments far behind and discover happiness on their own terms. While destinies in these cynical landscapes can be as pre-determined as a Greek tragedy,perhaps the motivation for Johnson’s characters was best exemplified in The Brothers Bloom when that film’s melancholy hero stated his need for “an unwritten life.” While most directors are fascinated by the kinkiness and shamelessness of noir environments, Johnson seems most compelled by the crippling sadness underneath them and the emotional damage it inflicts on seemingly ordinary people.
When it comes to the future world of Looper, Johnson once again shows off his knack for lived-in noir atmospheres without making a big deal about it. The future here isn’t decked out with super-advanced cityscapes and grotesque robotic claustrophobia, but shabby tent cities filled with countless vagabonds and festering urban decay. This is not a future in which technology is thriving but desperation is festering, with homeless Americans hurting each other like wolves to protect their well-being. As present day America is currently wrestling with political unrest and deep economic uncertainty, the scary thing about Looper’s future world is that its pessimism doesn’t feel terribly off from what could plausibly happen to this country under extreme circumstances (especially with the sick-joke-of-a-plot-point that China is the only place to be in the future). The logical depravity of this scary American future tied with the self-reliant cynicism within most of the characters is a scarier cautionary warning than any recent political documentary trying to predict America’s uneasy future.
Time travel plots can inherently bring about endless paradoxes, logical contradictions, and scientific confusion. Looper deals with these issues by simply having the characters reluctant to get into specifics. As Old Joe points out, talking out all the details means “we could be here all day.” Besides, Johnson is clearly interested in such a plot to ponder what it would be like if a person came face-to-face with their future selves. The inspired idea here is that both the younger and the older man probably wouldn’t be terribly fond of one another. It’s typical of human nature that when we look into a mirror, we instinctively check for flaws. Therefore, staring at an older version of ourselves would probably make us highlight all the bad things. Ironically, both Joes are appalled by the same flaw under different circumstances: their need to carry out awful acts in order to protect their own lifestyles. The centerpiece scene shows both Joes meeting face-to-face in a diner they frequent. As both Joes lay out their underlying personal motivations, they grown angrier with each other by the minute, erupting into a brawl. Johnson also plays up their tension using their obvious metaphysical connections, for Young Joe can communicate with Old Joe by scarring messages on his body, while Old Joe can see what Young Joe sees through the logic of memory.
Aside from the appealing time-travel spectrum here, Johnson even slyly introduces a “what if Hitler was raised differently” angle into the plot with the treatment of young Cid, who may or may not grow up to be an ultra-violent supervillian. This subplot actually offers a rare hope in the film by shrewdly commenting on the future of today’s youth. Cid figuratively suggests that if the confusion and anxiety of today’s youth is mixed with a chaotic and bitter society, then the violent egotism and moral ambiguity of our country could reach cataclysmic proportions. The answer to this problem is suggested with the presence of Sara (obviously of the Sarah Conner mold), whose combination of no-nonsense feminism and maternal nurturing offers the perfect antidote to impending evil. Cid is a symbolic visualization that if we put the well-being of the future before our own selfish needs, then perhaps we can solve the problems currently festering without our present society. A key character comes to this same realization in the film’s shattering yet logical climax.
One of the main draws of the film’s performances is seeing Joseph Gordon-Levitt drawing out how a young Bruce Willis would act. Thanks to the prosthetic makeup artistry of Jamie Kelman and Kazuhiro Tsuji, Gordon-Levitt is given latex assistance to look uncannily like a young Willis, but it’s Levitt’s acute attention to Willis’ trademark mannerisms that really drives the clone job home. Even so, Levitt is astounding at hinting at his character’s internalized uncertainties about the world and embittered core that yearns to do good in spite of spiritual confusion. Willis rounds out the character’s effect by bringing his own sense of loss and bottled-up rage to the elderly side of the character. Yet together as a team, they help build a whole spectrum of a man whose exhausted by a deadly world and trying desperately to salvage whats left of his heart. As for the other performances, Jeff Daniels provides an interesting embodiment of a loosened, messy future as Young Joe’s boss, Emily Blunt delivers much-yearned-for feminine ideals in a world of overly-hostile testosterone, and Pierce Gagnon is simply astounding as Cid, eerily conveying a precious child with alarming shadows surrounding his soul.
Filled to the brim with surprisingly-intricate writing that keeps on giving, Looper will once again remind starving audiences about the pleasures of smart sci-fi. Johnson is a filmmaker whose not afraid to mix seemingly incongruent genres together, and mixing a time travel tale with a bleak crime noir have energized each other with a surprising jolt you won’t soon forget. With sci-fi cleverness and relevant ideological musings to spare, Looper shows that brains and excitement should always be tied together in an endless loop.
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