In Looper, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis play younger and older versions of a time-traveling assassin. Photo: Alan Markfield/Sony Pictures
Here’s the problem with most time-travel movies: They’re about time travel. Or they get trapped in the paradoxes time travel presents (e.g., if you make out with your mom in the past you may never be born). Not that subverting the space-time continuum and hop-skipping all over the past and future isn’t cool — it’s totally cool — but so many time-travel stories have been told that it’s hard to make a new one.
Luckily, Looper is not a time-travel movie. Instead, director Rian Johnson, who also wrote the script, smartly uses the invention of time travel as the jumping-off point for a compelling tale, rather than making it the tale itself. Even when he does stumble on a time-travel trope or two, the scene serves the story instead of being distracting.
Looper is also one hell of a ride. The R-rated movie, which opens Friday, begins by getting to the point.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)
There are the moments where Looper truly excels at simultaneously being a sci-fi film, an action movie, and a thought-provoking drama.
The year is 2044 and time travel has been invented 30 years in the future — and almost immediately made illegal, which is to say criminals are the only ones using it. These future villains send anyone they want 86′ed back in time to be killed by assassins from the past known as “loopers.” As Joe the looper (played by the ever-evolving Joseph Gordon-Levitt) explains, they kill their marks and dispose of the bodies — or, “I do the necessaries, collect my silver.” (Each target is sent back with bricks of silver strapped to their backs.)
Loopers in Joe’s world live relatively sweet lives compared to the decrepit conditions around them. They possess money, women, some weird new hallucinogen that’s taken via eyedropper and cool vintage cars (Joe’s baby is a Miata, LOL). Their nights are full of partying until the day they “close their loop” and their future self is sent back for them to kill, with bricks of gold on their backs. Then most of them just party nonstop. They’re rich, in possession of the knowledge of when and how they’ll die, and have nothing to kill but time.
That is unless they can’t pull the trigger on themselves. When Joe’s friend Seth — a telekinetic mutant, or TK — comes to his apartment one night scared to death after just such a blunder, he tells Joe that his future self informed him that a new crime boss has been going around closing all the loops in sight. At first Joe hides Seth in his stash room, but eventually gives him up after being called before their boss Abe (a comically maniacal Jeff Daniels, whose character has come from the future to run the operation). What happens next is a gruesome, yet awesome, twist on Marty McFly’s disappearing hand from Back to the Future.
In moments like this, Looper truly excels at pulling off the hat trick of simultaneously being a sci-fi film, an action movie and a thought-provoking drama. It doesn’t get mired down in how time travel works — there is no souped-up DeLorean, no TARDIS. In fact, the actual time-travel mechanism is seen only once and the technology isn’t explained. (In Johnson’s world, moviegoers are big enough nerds to just accept time travel and move on.)
The movie’s future doesn’t look too futuristic or too dystopian: The hoverbikes don’t work that well and the beautiful cellphones still can’t get signals out in farm country. In other words, it feels like the real world, just in 30-some years.
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