Seriously pondering the conundrum of being killed by one’s future self, Rian Johnson’s Looper is almost unique in being both an intelligent and an entertaining time-travel film.
USA
4*
Director:
Rian Johnson
Screenwriter:
Rian Johnson
Director of Photography:
Steve Yedlin
Running time: 120 minutes
Looper stands alone among a horde of wannabe-serious science-fiction films dealing with time travel; the inherent contradictions in the premise are taken seriously, but not so seriously that the audience gets lost in long-winded explanations. Besides, most viewers should be familiar with these contradictions already – for an insightful yet entertaining recap, go watch the Back to the Future trilogy again.
Director Rian Johnson’s film delivers on the promise he displayed in Brick, a neo-noir film replete with its own Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue, almost a language unto itself, though set in the present. That film, as does Looper, starred the ever-impressive Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a high-school student who gets involved in the underworld when his girlfriend is killed.
The plot of Looper concerns the existential conundrum faced by a number of individuals in the present, which is 2044 in the state of Kansas: The title refers to those who carry out the job of killing people sent back from the future, where it is much more difficult to get rid of bodies.
Recently, however, the people sent back have been the Loopers themselves, 30 years older. This is called “closing the loop”. They arrive bound and gagged, and when the job is done, their present-day versions discover gold strapped around the bodies of their older (and now, late) selves, giving new meaning to the phrase “a golden handshake”.
In this way, the Loopers can live pleasant lives for the next 30 years while they wait to be sent back to the past and be killed by themselves.
Killing oneself is bad enough, but living with that guilt and yet building a life for three decades only to have it taken from you, even if you know it is coming closer every morning you open your eyes, is agony. The emotional turmoil is beautifully presented in a brief sequence that sees Gordon-Levitt turn into Bruce Willis, who is shot, in more ways than one, in a scene about a half-hour into the film.
Both actors play the role of Joe, and when, in the film’s most frequently presented reality, young Joe doesn’t kill old Joe, they are both in danger because news travels quickly between the present and the future, where the Rainmaker, a mystical figure who is closing all the loops and wielding ever-more power, is none too pleased by the way events are unfolding back in 2044.
For this reason, Joe makes it a priority to find the Rainmaker as a child and kill him, what with the latter’s being responsible for the death of a very important person in Joe’s life. It turns out there are three possibilities as to who the baby Rainmaker might be, and while old Joe goes off into the city to track down two of them, young Joe stays behind in rural Kansas to find the third one. Once the child is killed, old Joe should evaporate, as he would never have been sent back here in the first place, and the loop would remain open…
On a Kansan farm, young Joe finds Sara (Emily Blunt), who is raising her young boy, Cid, on her own. Cid seems rather precocious, and we quickly catch on to the likelihood this is the feared overlord of the future. Young Joe, despite himself, strikes up a friendship with Sara while old Joe continues his killing spree in the city, not knowing whether the execution of a young child will make things right or count for collateral damage.
The film itself doesn’t have many narrative possibilities here, but even though we know how things are likely to develop, the scenes on the farm with the young Joe and Cid the toddler have tension that keeps us from second-guessing the actions of the characters or the director.
But Johnson’s vision of the future is not bleak at all – as the wheat fields make abundantly clear – despite the ghastly poverty we are shown in some of the opening scenes. He presents us with a future that is very recognisable, and it even features the mild-mannered Jeff Daniels as the Loopers’ handler in the present.
Don’t discount the small details in the film, as many character traits, minor as they may seem, often have a role to play later on. Admittedly, there are questions to be asked about the wisdom of crime bosses in the future to send someone back only to be killed by their younger selves without any kind of supervision, given the very easily comprehensible moral dilemma. But such questions are negligible because Looper is tight enough to focus your attention in the moment.
Few films can balance a credible treatment of time travel with a narrative that is engaging and thrilling, and whatever you think about the deceptively closed ending, this one deserves great praise.