Looper (Film Review)

[selenak]

This is one of those films where the trailer leads you to expect something quite different to the actual film, and I mean that in a good way. What I thought after watching the trailer: young Joe and old Joe would after early fighting team up to bring down the organisation after them, Bruce Willis would do his quipping action hero stick, and there would be the macho male bonding equivalent of a hug before young Joe, now wiser, continues his life and old Joe goes back to the future.

This is so not what happens.

Which is to the film's great advantage. It does some genuinenly interesting and unpredictable things with its time travel/free will versus fixed fate premise. Not to say it's perfect: for half of this film, the gender fail is enormous as the future is divided into dead Madonnas and living whores, while violent crime is exclusively a male occupation. Then we get Emily Blunt who is neither and basically becomes the main character instead of the two Joes, so there is that. Oh, and don't try to think through the logistics of how the time travel works: as in most stories with time travel, this only gets you a headache.

However, something worth keeping in mind is the very basic question as to which model of time travel we're dealing with - time travel stories usually can be divided into those who assume there is only one timeline, which means that if you change the past, the original time line is erased and it's not possible to go back there or save anything from it (Farscape has a third season episode like that), and the multiverse model where different timelines co exist, the original one and the ones created by each change (this, for example, is what Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles uses, and also the Star Trek reboot film). Looper is basically model A with some borrowings from model B - we see a flashback (flash forward?) to the thirty years that transform young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Lewitt) into old Joe (Bruce Willis), and because of the events of the film, none of these things will ever happen, nor will old Joe ever exist, yet evidently old Joe exists for the course of the film and young Joe would not make the decisions he does if not for the older self who comes back. As I said: time travel is a headache.

Speakilng of young Mr. Inception and My Name Is Robin, he plays a younger version of Bruce Willis very plausible, but maybe the biggest surprise is this: contrary to what the trailer led me to expect, the Willis version isn't there to teach his younger self how not to be a youthful idiot, or anything like that. He makes that claim, sure. But as it turns out, younger Joe is actually the more moral and braver man. Old Joe claims he was "saved" by his wife (that would be the dead Madonnna) from his screwed up junkie assassin life and has no choice but to, in the past, kill the future Evil Crimelord of Evil, the "Rainmaker", who will in the future be responsible for Joe's wife's death as a fallout from the attempt to capture Joe. When young Joe not unreasonably makes the suggestion to be shown a picture of the woman so he can avoid her, never marrying her, thus avoiding the situation which gets her killed, old Joe immediately declines; he doesn't just want to save her life, he wants to have her. And in order to have her, he's willing to kill three children, one of whom will be the Rainmaker. Yes, the other time travel trope this film toys with is the "would you kill Hitler?" question. (Sans Hitler.) The question as to whether people can change is as important as whether you can change events that once happened: old Joe may consider himself "saved", but as it turns out, he's simply become an even more efficient and ruthless killer than he already was.

Joe (any version of him) started out as an abandoned child who gets picked up by a crimelord and taught to kill when he's far too young to know better, and the vicious circle of victims becoming victimizers is a key theme of the film. However, it doesn't draw the nihilistic conclusion that this is inevitable. Half way through young Joe meets Sara (Emily Blunt) and her son Cid, who have a confusing, volatile relationship of her own (that we get to witness in scenes without Joe present, which is how Sara becomes a character in her own right and as I said basically the main one of the second half), and yes, young Cid (who is a really well played child character, neither saccharinely sweet nor a spawn of evil pod person) is the future Evil Crimelord of Evil. But he isn't yet. He's a child. And Sara is fully aware of his potential.

The solution young Joe finds to break the vicious circle occured to me, but only five seconds or so before he actually does it. I never would have guessed it at the start of the film. Which ends on a cautiously optimistic note; there is no guarantee that what Joe does really will make all the difference and that Cid won't become the Rainmaker, but he now can have a very different life, and so can Sara. The future isn't fixed anymore for them; I wandered out of the cinema both relieved and impressed.

Standout horror-of-time-travel sequence: when one of young Joe's assassin colleagues lets his older self go, gets captured himself (thanks to Joe, which is important later), and we see the older man being forced to give himself up to be killed - by first scars appearing, then fingers dissappearing, then his nose tip, then yet another limb, as his younger self gets being amputated bit by bit. (Which we don't see - we "just" see the older man changing.) Not only is this gruesome without being bloody but efficiently demonstrates why the Joes go on the run later on.

Standout says it all by implication sequence: Sara's first argument with her son, which ends with her locking herself up in a safe. Once you find out the backstory you know why, but it's also a perfect image for what their relationship is at this point.

Neat world building detail: Abe, the crimelord, who made young Joe what he becomes, who organizes the "loopers" and himself was sent back from the future in order to set the whole thing up wears a different fashion style from what the other characters do. His clothes look vaguely Chinese (though he himself is Caucasian, which fits with the other heavy hints the film gives that in the future, China is THE floroushing superpower while the US is a crime ridden wasteland. (And something unmentionable happened to France, it seems.)

All in all: eminently watchable. I didn't love it - it felt too claustrophobic for that to me - but I certainly, as mentioned, came out impressed.