Rian Johnson
has been making a solid name for himself within film geek circles. His feature debut Brick is a worthy cult classic and his follow up The Brothers Bloom was a fascinating film that
made it onto my favourite films of 2010 list. Combined with his directing a couple of Breaking Bad episodes, the
announcement that he’d be making a time travel movie starring Joseph
Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis pretty much set geek hearts alight. His previous work proves that he is not only
a writer/director that likes intelligent, clever stories, but one that also has
a great creative and visual eye. Thus
Looper has been the source of anticipation for quite some time now.
Like all
good time travel movies it’s important to get the rules set from the start. The year is 2044. Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a looper. Somewhere in the future time travel has been
invented but it’s judiciously controlled. A system is set up whereby loopers are employed to kill people who've been sent back to 2044; people who supposedly need to be disposed of. It’s
a dirty business and probably not strictly legal. A confluence of events
means Joe’s older self (Willis) is sent back for Joe to terminate. He doesn’t do it and Old Joe goes on the
run. Joe needs to stop him as you don’t
let these future people escape... especially your older self. That’s the basics in a nutshell.
So, to
address the biggest factor in a time travel movie – does the filmmakers concept
of it work? Principally, yes. Rather than being about the act of time
travel and “science” behind it, more focus is given to the aftermath, meaning it
serves more as a catalyst and nice framing for the events that occur, making for a more engaging story, mostly. It
can be all too easy to tie your story into knots and confuse the audience when travelling
through time. Not so here, with the
story presented in a pretty logical manner that doesn’t require any head scratching if you just go with it.
But there is
a problem with the story. The first half
of Looper functions beautifully, fantastically setting the scene, showing us its fascinating future vision and allowing
the introduction of the compelling concept of how far you’d go to stop your future
self. Then the story arcs off into an
unexpected direction that is somewhat akin to hitting a brick wall. This chosen route offers some even further
challenging questions, which I thought were explored well conceptually, but in
the actual context of the story and the flow of the film it did nothing more than slow it down to the point where interest was starting to wane. One of the elements that informed this aspect
of the story, the more fantastical TK side, really felt like it didn’t need to be in this film.
The real
strength of Looper is the talent involved. Gordon-Levitt has had a particularly strong year already with The Dark Knight Rises and Premium Rush, the latter of which probably wouldn’t have been
as good without him in the lead. Joe is
ultimately an antihero. We’re rooting
from him and we would probably aspire to his life in the context of the future we’re
shown, but he’s still a flawed character who is really nothing more than a glorified
hitman. And so he successfully traverses
that line of likeability, which is certainly aided by the make-up to heighten
his likeness to his older self, helping to make him look a tad less
JG-L like. Willis is his usual reliable
self, somewhat playing to his archetype but always enjoyable to watch. Emily Blunt plays her character well too but she is ultimately superfluous to the story.
Looper looks
great, as ever with anything Johnson directs, and I was intrigued by the vision
of the future it presents. The whole
package is interesting so it’s a shame that such a strong first half is let
down by a dominating plot thread in the second half that should really have
been jettisoned and considered for a separate film. It wasn’t the right direction for
Looper but is something I would want to see explored elsewhere. Unsurprisingly its utilisation of
the time travel concept is successful and helped by approaching it somewhat economically – it may not live
up to the heights of Primer (that is the master of all time travel films after
all), but it is more successful in this area than most. As much as I liked Looper, and don’t get me
wrong I did like it a lot, I feel disappointed that it didn’t live up to it’s
potential. I hope it continues to do
well at the box office though as we need more bigger budget films with this
type of intelligent approach.
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