time travel

Looper (2012)

André Crous

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.

LooperUSA
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.

La jetée (1962)

André Crous

La jetée, Chris Marker’s classic short film about time travel, is as intelligent, as unconventional and as emotionally engaging today as it was upon its release in 1962.

La JetéeFrance
4*

Director:
Chris Marker
Screenwriter:
Chris Marker
Director of Photography:
Chris Marker

Running time: 28 minutes

Perhaps best known today as the short film that inspired Terry Gilliam to make 12 Monkeys, Chris Marker’s La jetée is very unconventional as a moving picture precisely because the pictures do not move. Unlike the overwhelming majority of films out there, of which movement is a defining feature, this 28-minute work of science-fiction employs photographs to tell its story, and the reason is quite simple: These are supposed to be fragments of memory, and memories are experiences that we almost never remember in their entirety but rather in snippets.

The first few moments already hint at the distorted nature of the world we are about to encounter when the opening credits themselves are altered, albeit very subtly: Upon expressing thanks to the research department at the national public broadcaster, the Radiodiffusion-télévision française (RTF), the credits change momentarily from “Service de la Recherche de la R.T.F.” to “Service de la Trouvaille de la R.T.F.”. In French, the word “trouvaille” means a “(lucky) find”, and the fact that most viewers might only notice this change during a second or a third viewing underscores the notion that there is more beneath the surface than we may realise at first.

Indeed, the entire story depends on our impression of reality, constructed on the basis of fragmented memories, that in the end is revealed to be defective in a crucial way that the main character (and we) realises all too late.

The film has almost no diegetic sounds but does have a narrator. This narrator’s voice belongs to Jean Négroni, whose surname is curiously, though perhaps intentionally, written without the requisite diacritical marks in the opening credits.

Set mostly in a dystopian environment (what used to be Paris) after the end of the Third World War, a nameless man (played by Davos Hanich), is haunted by an image burnt into his memory as a child. Shortly before the outbreak of the war that would destroy most of mankind, he was standing on the viewing pier (the “jetty” in the title) at Orly International Airport in Paris. There, he saw a woman, but the rest of his memory is blurred by a feeling of violence and the perception that someone had died.

Today, huddled up in subterranean passageways under the Palais de Chaillot because the world above is too radioactive for human life, there are victors and victims, and the former are conducting experiments on the latter: The prisoners have to imagine a moment from their past so intensely that they are transported back and can eventually bring help from the future into the present. But there are many failed attempts, with the experiment’s subjects either dying or losing their minds.

With the image of the woman seared into his brain, the main character is successful at making the past vibrate with such life that it becomes a living memory, although not without pain. And all the while, in a nod to the events of the Second World War, which had ended barely 17 years before La jetée‘s release, the people conducting the experiment are ominously whispering to each other in German.

When the man starts forming images in his head that appear to correspond to the peacefulness of the past, the narrator insists on calling them “real”: “a real bedroom”, “real children”, “real birds”, “real cats” and, deliberately anticlimactically, “real graves”. And yet, there is a firm suspicion on our part that these are merely imaginary projections, most importantly because there is no movement. Another acknowledgement of the likely fictitious status of the events comes when the narrator explains that the man “never knows whether he moves towards her, or is pushed, whether he’s made it all up, or is only dreaming”.

But this is where the intelligence of Marker’s chosen form starts to reveal itself because before long, the man and the woman from his past find themselves in a museum with stuffed animals. By this stage, the viewer has already started to ascribe movement to the film’s frozen images, and therefore the exercise now engenders a cognitive animation of the immobile animals, too, which produces a frisson and a feeling of confusion, not unlike what the main character is experiencing. This bewilderment is particularly palpable when we see a close-up of a shark baring its teeth right next to the couple. At another point, in a timeless space filled with statues, the narrator also describes his memory as a kind of museum.

The final development in La jetée, during which the man is sent to the future, is a little ridiculous and compares badly with the rest of the film, as expressionless, alienoid humans with medallion-like objects on their pale foreheads learn of the desperation in the present.

The ending will leave the viewer breathless, because at the end of a brief but brilliant action montage, insofar as that label may be applied in this case, the smallest revelations suddenly hit us like a brick wall and leave us pulverised with despair. The final image is held just long enough for us to take in but not fully digest the gravity of the narrator’s explicit closing of the circle of life – and with it, of hope.

Arrival (2016)

André Crous

Arrival makes its mark with an ingenious use of the concept of time and a curious portrayal of aliens, but the soppiness of a central relationship is this work’s major flaw.

ArrivalUSA
3.5*

Director:
Denis Villeneuve
Screenwriter:
Eric Heisserer
Director of Photography:
Bradford Young

Running time: 115 minutes

Despite its ever more sentimental bent and its simplistic good guy/bad guy dynamics, Denis Villeneuve’s science-fiction film Arrival is a cleverly constructed tale of first contact between humans and aliens and has a satisfying twist at its core.

The twist has to do with time, and more specifically with viewing events not in bits and pieces advancing from A to B to C, from one day to the next, but as an all-encompassing whole seen all at once. In this way, the domino effect is no longer at play, and cause and effect disappear into a new space-time continuum that until now had been illustrated the best by the “Cause and Effect” episode of the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series, which depicts the shaping of the present thanks to future events being anticipated through contact with the past.

The film’s emotion-laden opening sequence, which introduces us to single mother and renowned linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams), quickly moves from one beat to the next as her baby daughter grows up and turns into a teenager before suddenly falling ill and dying of a rare illness. This episode is firmly in our heads not only because it kicks the narrative into gear but also because Villeneuve returns to it again and again and again throughout the rest of the film. But while Banks’s recollection of these moments is perceived as melancholy memories, something else is happening, and we have to recalibrate our sense of time in a clever way.

The idea of viewing a story – never mind one’s own life – as a whole rather than in its constituent parts is an intimidating proposition, but such an approach is central to communication (and action) in Arrival because the aliens that arrive in their gigantic grey shell-shaped pods and touch down in a desolate expanse of land in Montana communicate in precisely this way.

Their signs consist not of distinct words but of circular signs that convey a complete overview of both meaning and feeling and can range from the basic to the hypercomplex. And for Banks to understand their message, her brain needs to start thinking about life in such a way, too, affirming the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language also transforms our perception of life itself. Thus, by acquiring a language that sees the beginning and the end rolled up into one, she starts seeing her own life that way as well, including events she is yet to experience.

Of course, she needs a foil in the shape of research partner and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). Renner’s part is woefully underdeveloped, however. Beyond wanting to jump straight into asking the aliens about Fibonacci numbers without understanding that mathematics is not a particularly useful language for basic communication, he appears not to do all that much except support Banks on her surprisingly successful English as a Foreign Intergalactic Language course with the aliens. These two are sent by the government to ascertain the purpose of the visit by the aliens, which have landed at 12 spots on the globe but remained hidden inside their shell-shaped spacecraft.

Villeneuve, whose film has traces of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, particularly in the scoring by master composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, with whom he also collaborated on Sicario, uses Steven Spielberg’s well-known technique (from Close Encounters but most famously from Jaws) of delaying a major introduction. The aliens themselves (which, unlike in most other films, are not particularly anthropoid but look very much like the spider in Villeneuve’s Enemy, albeit with seven instead of eight legs, thus earning them the label “heptapods”) are almost never completely visible.

But more generally, the director does not do justice to the intelligence of his story. He beats the relationship between Banks and her daughter to death with too many inserts while failing to convey Banks’s perception of the frequency of these images. But with the exception of a life-changing, humanity-saving flash-forward in the final act, an exception that proves the rule, he doesn’t cast his net any farther to provide other interesting examples of using consciousness about time past, present and future in an unexpected way.

Villeneuve, who captured the suspense in Sicario so well, is surprisingly inept when it comes to creating tension, and he creates a Hunt for Red October moment by having the camera point straight at a team member who will betray them all. And he does this not once but multiple times. In fact, it is much more blatant than the infamous introduction to the cook (later revealed to be a traitor) in John McTiernan’s 1990 film.

The film has some beautiful moments, including the already mentioned flash forward during the climax, as well as a voiceover delivered by Renner to explain the heptapods, much like he is narrating a documentary about them years into the future. But its presentation of the global collaboration and suspicion between the groups trying to investigate the aliens is incredibly stilted, and when we hear that the Sudan is planning to attack the aliens, it is difficult not to burst out laughing.

The sentimentality in Arrival may be a bit much to stomach, and there are simply too many inserts with Banks and her daughter, but the flexibility of time and the way in which it is made visible in the film bring us another perspective that might just trickle down into other science-fiction films in the future.