Time travel is tricky for both characters and filmmakers, a
gambit filled with potential plot holes, paradoxes and butterfly effects well
known to anyone even glancingly familiar with this sci-fi subgenre. These kinds
of movies generally litter their runtime with unanswerable questions. With
Looper, writer-director Rian Johnson (he
of the great high school
noir film
Brick) has given the time travel picture
a jolt of smart intensity, embracing the concept by making unanswerable philosophical
time travel questions into an advantage. It joins the classics of the subgenre
(from Chris Marker’s
La Jetée to
Robert Zemeckis’s
Back to the Future,
from Shane Carruth’s
Primer to James
Cameron’s
Terminator series) as a
film that, rather than getting overwhelmed by a need to explain and explain,
simply uses its time travel rules, at once utterly simple and dizzyingly
complex, in the service of a great story.
Johnson knows that great science fiction starts not just with
world-building or dazzling effects, although Looper does both very well, but with ground-level characters,
recognizable personalities who happen to find themselves in fantastical
scenarios. Take for instance the man who will be both protagonist and
antagonist in this film, sometimes even at the same time. His name is Joe. He
kills people for a living. More accurately, he kills people from the future.
The year is 2044 and although time travel has yet to be invented, it will be
soon enough. In 2074, time travel is illegal and thus only used by a crime
syndicate for the sole purpose of disposing bodies. That’s where Joe and his
co-workers come in.
Known as Loopers, their job is to take their guns out to the
middle of nowhere, kill the future people, and collect a paycheck until the
time comes that their future employers decide to “close the loop,” forcing them
into retirement by killing their future selves. It’s a complicated conceit that
plays out with stunning simplicity, effortlessly explained and immediately the
stuff of high stakes when the time comes for Joe to close his loop. He finds
himself caught off guard by his older self, who fights back and escapes. Old
Joe (Bruce Willis) is now on the run from his younger self (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt, with makeup and prosthetics that convincingly creates an
approximation of young Willis) and both are forced to flee their fellow Loopers
(Jeff Daniels, Garret Dillahunt, and Noah Segan among them) who are determined
to set the future straight by closing up this temporal loose end.
By the time this happens, the world of the film feels
sturdy, convincing. High-tech embellishments create a world that feels almost like our own, close enough to
recognize, advanced enough to feel foreign. The characters are all world-weary
men, doing a messy job with professionalism. This new wrinkle in their
day-to-day grind of violence by day and hard partying by night is treated with
a tired tension, an urgency that is both intense and unsurprising. Something
like this was bound to happen. Indeed, we’ve seen that it has at least once,
but that time clean up was relatively easy. Both Joes are hard to catch. The
older Joe roams the cityscape – Johnson imagines a future with both hoverbikes
and pervasive homelessness – on a mission to change his fate. The younger Joe
hides out with a tough farm woman (Emily Blunt) and her little boy (the
adorable Pierce Gagnon).
At first, I thought I had the film pinned down as simply a
fantastic man-on-the-run picture with sci-fi influences, a sort of doubled, time-shifting
version of
The Fugitive. But suddenly, the movie slips away and grows deeper,
darker, sadder, and more beautiful. To even suggest the shape the story takes
from here would be a disservice to you, reader. This is most definitely a film
that plays even better with a joyful sense of discovery. Let me just say that
the film finds surprising, upsetting, exciting, and rather moving ways to
circle its main thematic concerns about what makes a person become the person
they will ultimately be. This is a thriller with plenty of gunplay, chase
scenes, cold-blooded murder (most shockingly of total innocents), and seamless
special effects, but Johnson treats these developments with a weight and
seriousness.
The performances are
completely convincing and, through the characters and the style, which is
flashy and distinct without once overwhelming the driving story, the film feels
grounded in a way that many films of its ilk don’t.
Looper contains notes of deep darkness that are treated without
sensationalism. Here, violence hurts. Injuries have consequences. Scars linger.
This film thrillingly skirts past all the usual pitfalls and
creates an exciting and cohesive film that is violent and cynical, but romantic
and humanistic as well. Johnson embraces these apparent contradictions to
follow loops of plot to the kind of climax that feels at once startling and
wholly inevitable. Looking back on its entirety, it’s easy to see how fully and
neatly Johnson has led us to this point. This ingeniously structured movie,
neat and tidy by the end, is skillfully complex, a movie that operates from a
set of rules that seem fully thought through, inhabiting a world rather than
using it as narratively convenient. With Steve Yedlin’s warm yet precise cinematography
of great pictorial beauty, from the steel-and-concrete, graffiti-covered
streets of downtown to the dusty fields of farmland, recalling the casual
gracefulness in the down-to-earth sci-fi of early Spielberg, it’s a story of
imagination and emotion set against a detailed futuristic environment that
feels detailed in compelling ways that nonetheless remain in the background
with minimal fuss. This is a world, not merely a stage.
And on this stage, inner conflict exploded outwards. The
central drama of the film is nothing less than a man fighting to become a
better man by changing his circumstances, an older man literally drawn into
combat with his younger self. There’s a tense, funny scene between the two
versions in a diner that brings new meaning to the phrase “talking to yourself.”
Whether one realizes it or not, each second takes a person away from the person
one is now and towards the person one will become. For Joe, time travel has
brought this process into sharp focus. Both versions have a chance to regard
the entirety of his life to date and decide how best to get out of this
situation with their life (and maybe even the world) better off. But is this
even possible with outside forces and circumstances crushing in on them (him)?
Johnson patiently complicates the scenario, sketching
details of plot with camera moves that silently reveal new information and shot
compositions that cement tension and power dynamics. He off-handedly introduces
concepts that will come roaring back into focus later. Here is a movie about
fate that feels inevitable but vibrant, a movie about choices that feels
carefully designed. Like all the best time travel movies, when it ended I felt
the pleasant confusion that made me want to see it again, to diagram the
timelines and figure out what, in the end, remains real and what has been
cancelled out. Best of all, I felt confident that I very well could do just
that. Looper is a film so emotionally
engaged and technologically accomplished, so confident in the rules of its
universe, that there’s a feeling its implications resonate far beyond any
given frame, beyond the focus of this particular story. Johnson has created the
rare film that seems to expand.
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