Critical Recommendation: Looper

One of the most startling things about Looper is how ordinary it looks. The cornfields are just normal cornfields, the alleyways are as dingy and run-down as they've always been, and the farmhouses and diners are exactly squat to write home about, as well. Sure, the inner city takes on a slight cyberpunk tone, but not like the overwhelming techno-noir of Blade Runner. This seeming normalcy is startling because it serves as an unassuming backdrop to what turns out to be some of the deepest science fiction I've ever witnessed. Anchored by powerful performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, this movie asks us tough questions about both our memories of the past and our fate in the future, and its unpretentious worldbuilding is but one of the ways in which it causes such questions to land with sickening force.

I've talked about the cliche of saying you've never seen anything like... on my blog before, but Looper genuinely earns it. The movie is set in the year 2044, thirty years before time travel will be invented, and America has been ravaged by uncontrolled gang violence and transformed into a shadow of the nation it used to be. Joe does the best he can with the hand he's been dealt, and chooses to play with the system rather than against it; in this case, playing this way looks like becoming a specialized assassin known as a looper, someone who kills people zapped back to him from the future before disposing of their bodies. This is already dizzying stuff from director Rian Johnson, a man who isn't known to play by the "rules" of cinema, but he’s just getting started. One day, a man materializes on the execution mat Joe always places next to an out-of-the-way cornfield to avoid scrutiny, and as Joe looks into his eyes, he knows that there's something different about him. It doesn't take long for the realization to hit: he's me. He's not talking in a metaphorical sense, either. Johnson gleefully plays with the ethics and function of time travel in a thrilling, nearly paradoxical manner, and just so happens to make a brilliant film about love and fate while he's at it. 

One of the most impressive things about Looper is how perfectly it balances heady, high-concept ideas with heart. This is an intelligent movie, but it's far from clinical. Its characters feel like actual people, and they're given plenty of smart, heartfelt character development that flows naturally, never competing with their movie's concept. Though the concept is what people talk about when discussing this movie, the rich and compelling people in Looper are what it's really about.

Older Joe and Younger Joe take a perilous journey together in the hopes of changing a tragic future by any means necessary, and there is something so interesting about watching the older version of a man lecture his younger self about a hard life he hasn't lived yet, even if it's in the hopes of doing something that is, on paper, quite horrible - this world runs on necessity. It's a startling subversion of the well-trodden student-mentor character dynamic, and its tragic irony is not lost on a film that constantly uses the littlest, sweetest moments to confront you with some bitter truths about what these men are actually trying to do; I'll leave you in the dark as to what exactly that thing is for the sake of spoilers. The future is neither certain nor set in Looper, and the idea that Joe's current actions can affect it keeps everything he does important. Because time is so malleable in this world, and the future discussed with all the weight and normalcy of an average school day, the movie is granted an uncertainty that a predestinational viewpoint may have robbed it of—every horrible, heartfelt thing our characters do still matters.

Because time-travel technology hasn't been invented yet, many of the characters in Looper are still figuring it out for themselves. The movie asks you to accept a few seeming paradoxes, though that seems to be par for the course when it comes to movies that play with time. Because it's more about the assassin than concepts he and others living in his world barely understand, it works. We're given lengthy explanations of everything that Joe has already figured out, but these explanations feel earned, even if we're left with a few questions that I'm sure these characters are asking themselves, too. Pay attention to how this movie works, because it has a lot of moving parts, but its concept is incredibly rewarding, like a puzzle slowly falling into place one piece at a time.

The world-building in Looper is incredible, drawing on shades of Blade Runner and Interstellar while also staking out an identity to call its own. The technology in the movie is advanced enough to make the idea of time travel being invented in thirty years feasible, but dingy in a way that suggests it is mostly used for ill rather than any form of societal advancement. The movie is also never overwhelmingly technical or computer-generated. For every dingy high-rise and high-tech computer monitor, there's a cornfield and a farmhouse with a rocking chair on its porch. The world feels more real and lived-in than it does concerned with dazzling viewers, though that didn't stop it from making five times its production cost at the box office. 

Steve Yedlin's cinematography is extremely creative, especially when our characters take drugs, which isn't an uncommon recreational habit in their decaying world. The frame spins, it goes upside-down - anything to avoid staying right-side-up. The images themselves are also refreshingly utilitarian in a way that helps these hazier sequences avoid feeling overwhelming. The editing of Looper is also some of the most efficient I've ever seen. It captures a perfect snapshot of this movie's high-concept premise, keeping it from spiraling off into undefinedness, and also creates such an amazingly morbid sense of routine. Joe's been killing people for a while before his older self showed up, and this movie frames this with all the chilling routine of a nine-to-five. I'm certain that translating a concept like this to the screen was difficult, but Johnson avoids using this premise as a party trick, leveraging it in the service of ideas that will be weighty, time-travel or no. 

You've probably gathered as much by now, but Looper can be a confusing movie. It behaves a lot like Tenet when it comes to how it treats the concept of time, and you will be forced to pay attention to the story it's trying to tell. However, it is an incredibly rewarding experience if you are willing to invest in it, and it asks a lot of very interesting questions about the morality of your choices when you know how things will turn out if you go through with them - or if you don't. Looper is a heavy lose-lose dilemma for Joe. The weight of what he - both versions of him - need to do is impossible, but that doesn't stop him from trying. Seeing him crack under the weight of his difficult choices is heartbreaking, even if they are ultimately in service of a good cause. This movie is a time paradox and an ethical dilemma bundled into one, with neither stealing from the other's relevance. 

With a movie like this, all of the pieces need to click, and if they don't, the missing cog in the machine is always easy to spot. Looper is entirely in order. Its premise serves ideas bigger than itself, ideas it effortlessly conveys. This is one of the smartest science fiction movies I've ever seen. In many ways, that's because it's ultimately more about what's true of us on the most fundamental of levels than it is about science or fiction.

Looper - 10/10

John 5:28-30