Ryan McNeil
Some of us are our own worst enemy. We find that we make bad decisions, don’t learn from our mistakes, and ultimately cause more problems than we solve. But what would happen if we literally came face to face with ourselves and had to make a choice between what how we think we should handle a situation, and how our “other self” tells us we should handle it? It’s hard enough making a single decision sometimes, we don’t need to become our own heckler
LOOPER tells a story of a future where time travel is invented, and then quickly outlawed. However, several time machines are still around, and they are employed by criminals to eliminate their enemies. Their enemies are captured, and sent back in time to a particular moment and place. There they are killed by a waiting hitman, known as a “Looper”.
One Looper, named Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is taking to the job nicely, when he one day has to take care of a particular task. When he arrives at the spot, he has his blunderbuss gun cocked, and is ready to unload on his mark, he realizes that his mark is himself.
Well not himself…but himself thirty years older (played by Bruce Willis). Unable to pull the trigger, Joe allows his mark to take matters into his own hands. He doesn’t want the future that fate has dealt him, and is trying to convince his past self to come along for the ride. “The ride” will take him towards a woman named Sara (Emily Blunt) and a young boy named Cid…but the question that needs to be answered, is how these people can possibly change Joe’s fate.
At the crux of every great time travel story is the theme of consequences. Back in the early 1950’s, author Ray Bradbury warned us that even something as minute as the death of a butterfly could have serious repercussions on future events. What we often seem to lose sight of though, is that a time traveller is not only splintering their own fate, but the fate of every single person they come into contact with. LOOPER makes that distinction all the more difficult, since the core of the story deals with a man trying to keep up with another version of himself. We get so focused on what outcome they are creating for each other, that we forget about what they are doing to those around them…and that’s where the film really gets its lift.
What allows this lift to happen, is Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis. Besides the fact that the two men really feel like the same guy, they both embody a great deal of pathos. The younger Joe is at first very driven and panicked to clean up the mess he has made. However, as he spends more and more time with Sara and Cid, he is able to see the effects our decisions have on future events. Gordon Levitt quietly puts all of this together, and grafts it on to the situation at hand. His performance is a trusting one that the audience will understand what he understands, and that gives the film an unexpected maturity.
Then there’s Willis, who spends much of the film in a state of weary desperation. With almost every move, he is aware of how much he doesn’t belong, but nevertheless finds the courage to keep moving forward in the hopes of achieving his goal. Making his drive that much more moving is his lofty romanticism that in some version of the future his wife will survive. He hasn’t considered the idea that his very attempt to change his wife’s fate has actually already changed it, but when one is driven to protect the ones they love, moments to take stock of the situation are few and far between.
These performances, and the storytelling elements they represent are what make LOOPER a successful time travel story, and a great movie. Hollywood is chocked full of storytellers who rip audiences off with mindless action tales built on flimsy stakes. In writing something so full of humanity, and capturing it with palpable style, Rian Johnson offers us something grounded. Something tells me that several audience members will be taken aback in not getting what they believed they’d signed on for. I for one am of the belief that such surprises are something to be relished…not scorned.
LOOPER explores one of my favorite time travelling theories – the idea that we can’t go back and change things, because in the infinite, whatever we go back and do is something we always went back and did. We might think we’re topping someone bad from doing something awful, or preventing ourselves from making a mistake, but the truth is that we always went back and did what we did…so we aren’t changing destiny so much as we are fulfilling it.
This movie questions that very notion, about whether its possible to actually change the past, and if it is possible, just what sort of price has to be paid. It is also a movie that wants us to think about the future. When we make the selfish decisions that humans so often make, we end up causing ripples, and affecting people in ways we don’t intend or understand. In our minds, we might think we’re helping ourselves, or even helping others…but the truth sometimes is that we’re just setting some unfortunate events in motion. Try as we might, there’s just no going back and fixing things.
This has been on my must-see list for long, gonna have to skip your review until after I’ve seen it. Judging by your rating it should be worth the wait.
C’mon back after you’ve caught up with it. Until then I’ll offer this: forget about what you think you know.
“Something tells me that several audience members will be taken aback in not getting what they believed they’d signed on for. I for one am of the belief that such surprises are something to be relished…not scorned.”
I don’t like getting baited and switched, when the switch isn’t better than what the bait promised. I did not dig the mom/kid storyline one bit and was pained watching Bruce Willis’ character go from sympathetic sad character co-star to fighting for 4th place in screen time and wandering around like an idiot. The movie dies after the diner scene.
The switch in this case was for the audience to consider the events that shape who we are as people. In Joe’s case, it’s having to kill himself – in Cid’s case, it’s having an absentee parent. As much fun as another BLADE RUNNER-esque chase would have been, I think a human story like this is much headier.
As for Bruce, he goes from sympathetic and sad to a man going here and there killing children. I don’t think that’s nearly as “4th place” as you make it out to be.
I actually did like the change of direction midway through. It was setup to be a pretty straight forward story, but it becomes more complex and layered.
I also like that Rian Johnson gives the viewers just enough explanation on how Time Travel works in Looper, but without giving us a full exposition. He knows that the concept itself is a paradox so there really isn’t a need to do more.
It’s funny: For a “time travel movie” they don’t really care about the properties of time travel all that much. Sort of refreshing actually.
Time travel is one big paradox. Thanx go to Albert Einstein. In Looper you can’t send someone back 30 years and kill them because they are not dead! On their real birthday they will still be born and live all over again, thus forming a cycle. If you kill someone in their life cycle to prevent the birth the consequences could be dire for everyone. The best story written on the subject is Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”. In it a person, through multiply time travels, becomes his own mother,father,sister, brother, son and daughter! Mind bending. God I love Sci-Fi!
Oh wow, that sounds like an amazing read. Thanks for suggesting it.
BTW Ray – what’d you think of LOOPER? You didn’t mention.
Great review and I too quite enjoyed this one, enough to make this my fave movie of Sept. along w/ Headhunters. I love what you said about how our decision causes a ripple effect, that is so very true and it’s explored very well in this film.
Taking TIFF out of the equation, I only saw three new releases in theatres all month – so I’d definitely go with LOOPER for top slot (KILLER JOE and LAWLESS were the other two). I’m hoping I’ll have a chance to revisit LOOPER before it leaves theatres, but given how busy October is for me, that might not happen.
Rian Johnson recorded a commentary track to sync up with the movie if you choose to see it again in theatres with director commentary (http://soundcloud.com/rcjohnso/looper-theatrical-commentary). I’ll be seeing it again next weekend to try it out hahaha
Oh man – now I think I have to see it again!
After watching this film I was absolutely ready to jump on the Looper bandwagon, until I read this piece from i09. http://io9.com/5947919/the-awful-time-travel-trope-that-both-looper-and-doctor-who-embraced
I’m planning on writing my first proper review in a very long time, and the film I’ve lined up is Looper. That said, this article really gave me something to think about. Still, great review Mad.
For me things would hold more currency if you completely ignored that article. Any discussion of the mechanics of time travel completely undercut what stories like LOOPER and Dr. Who are trying to do.
It’s a sliver above nitpicking and doesn’t do anything to add to the conversation.
I’m extremely incredulous over that author’s thesis; arguments of that sort read as being far too PC for their own good. There’s nothing thematically unsound about the suicide solution in a time travel paradox, but the thing that article misses is that Joe doesn’t turn his blunderbuss on himself so much for the purposes of reconciling paradox as he does to protect Cid. That’s his primary goal. He’s not trying to untangle timelines, he’s trying to save this kid from suffering the same fate he did and wasting his life killing people and harboring nothing but anger and resentment.
If Looper does one thing well in its climax, it presents his choice as an act of self-sacrifice more than as an emergency reset button. And self-sacrifice comes from a very different place than the despair that suicide typically comes from.
I find a lot of the criticism of the film’s paradoxes kind of weird, especially when they’re made from a place of science fiction fandom. Lots of great science fiction puts forth a bullshit idea and uses that as a framing device on which to hang an examination of human, emotional, and/or social themes and ideas. Criticizing Looper‘s time travel is like criticizing District 9‘s vial of black goo– they’re MacGuffins, really.
And apart from that, Clarke’s third law is pretty valid here. Time travel is basically magic. We can talk about it as much as we want but it doesn’t exist and essentially exists alongside Gandalf’s glowing white beams of wizard power in Return of the King. There are worthy discussions to have about Johnson’s concept of time travel, but time travel is never part of the point of Looper— it’s just a plot device. So crying “paradox” is just about the most uninteresting and least fulfilling bent anyone can take against the film, especially given its rich, layered thematic material.
Anyways.
I clearly loved this film, given that my review went over 1000 words (usually I try to keep it between 890 and 1000), and given that I wrote nearly 2000 additional words in an essay on its cycles of violence (and given the number of comments I’ve made and discussions/arguments I’ve had about it). It’s a best-of-2012 for me. And like you, I love that Looper ends up being about what it’s about; I love that the film isn’t anything like what the trailers suggest it is. The best surprises are the ones you didn’t even know you wanted.
In the weeks since this has been released, I’ve been listening to a lot of the discussion surrounding the flaws people so readily picked with LOOPER. The points that have been brought up are that nobody seemed to care when similar “flaws” dotted THE TERMINATOR…or BACK TO THE FUTURE… but all of a sudden, we feel the need to tear the metaphysics apart.
You’re dead on – calling “paradox” is unfulfilling and uninteresting, and I think it’s just a knee-jerk response by people who have a limited imagination.
I’m clearly of the same mindset as you in loving this film and all of its ideas. In a time where every other week seems to offer up another property or another sequel, I welcome filmmakers who try to do something original.