Looper (2012)
Directed by Rian Johnson
In the year 2044, time travel has not yet been invented but in 30 years it will have been. When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they will send their target into the past where a looper, a hired gun, like Joe is waiting to mop up. Joe is getting rich and life is good until the day the mob decides to close the loop, sending back Joe's future self for assassination.
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40 films that influenced Looper
What critics say influenced Looper
For all its glossy sheen, however, Looper seems more intent on drawing on action flicks of yore; Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys and James Cameron’s The Terminator are clear sources of inspiration for Johnson as he interrogates time-travel based conundrums, most clearly via the older Joe, appearing to ask whether by attempting to change the future, how far would you go?
So in an eerie echo from the situation in the original “The Terminator” (1984) Joe is looking for any male child born in a certain hospital on a certain date.
It's essentially a low-tech variation on themes from "The Terminator" but ingenious enough to feel fresh, intriguing and even bewildering at times.
Johnson pays homage to The Terminator with a time-traveling antagonist coming to kill a child and the mother named Sara or Sarah (Connor).
There are echoes of Twelve Monkeys and especially The Terminator in Johnson’s story, and the movie’s final third gets a little bogged down in familiar sci-fi tropes.
With touches of The Terminator , the aforementioned Marker film and the inspired-by-it 12 Monkeys , a classic episode of The Twilight Zone and more, Looper is aware of its sci-fi legacy, but manages plenty of unique touches all its own.
There are nods to science-fiction films like “Blade Runner” in the futuristic society, but the fact that it is only 30 years in the future makes for a more relatable urban landscape.
With both its urban and rural-cornfield milieus marked by consuming bleakness, Looper harkens back to both Blade Runner and The Killers while nonetheless crafting its own unique spin on noir fatalism.
Tropes from Blade Runner, Twelve Monkeys, and the odd French New Wave thriller are mixed and matched to give the illusion you’re watching an ?existential?
There hasn’t been a movie quite like it, even though it has scenes and themes that we’ve seen before in movies like “The Terminator,” “Blade Runner” and some of the “X-Men” films.
Like Philip K. Dick - who wrote the story that became "Blade Runner," aspects of which "Looper" resembles - Johnson uses genre to develop unconventional ideas and alternative possibilities.
It’s a future as textured, richly detailed and despairing as the one depicted in “Blade Runner,” although at least in Ridley Scott’s movie, the Japanese owned the United States.
Looper may not have the bell-ringing resonance of Chris Marker's La Jetée , one of its touchstones, but it's a jaunty match-up of genre and character drama that's far smarter and more finely wrought than almost anything else in the multiplexes.
Slamming genre cheap thrills together with high-art aspirations, Mr. Johnson spins a fast-moving entertainment out of a setup that could have been cooked up by the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick and was undoubtedly influenced by Chris Marker’s cinematic touchstone from 1962, “ La Jetée ,” in which scientists in a postapocalyptic world send, as the film puts it, “emissaries into time to call past and future to the rescue of the present.”
If I reveal that he is also named Joe, you can probably guess where this is going, especially if you can recall the central conceit of Chris Marker’s 1962 masterpiece La Jetee and its 1995 Terry Gilliam remake-remodel, Twelve Monkeys (which, of course, starred Willis): that of a young person encountering a time-travelling older version of himself.
Comparisons will be made to Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Terry Gilliam’s inspired derivative, 12 Monkeys, in which Bruce Willis also starred.
The 1995 movie, based on Chris Marker's La Jetee, was the complete entertainment package: humane, tragic, exciting, surprising and comical.
But Johnson doesn't settle for the philosophical; he revels in cinema allusions: in addition to 12 Monkeys and La Jetée, there's The Terminator (the main female character's name, played by a plucky Emily Blunt, is Sara), Memento, Angel Heart. . . .
"Looper" is informed by, and pays a kind of respectful homage to, those pictures, and it's also got some precedent in the no-budget sci-fi indie " Primer ."
With Looper, the borrowings are no less obvious, whether in the plotting (recent sci-fi mind-fuckers like Primer and Timecrimes vie with elements of noir and Bad Seed–style bad toddler behavior), the settings (the dystopian city of the future is drawn from countless cinematic models), or specific touches (the hired thugs in 2072 dress like spaghetti western bandits).
It was both a comfort and a concern to learn Shane Carruth of Primer fame had assisted Johnson in figuring out the mechanics of time travel here; a comfort because Primer is one of the finest time travel features ever made (and on a shoestring, no less), and a concern because it requires dozens of watches to totally unpack.
(This wouldn't have been the worst crime; you might have ended up with a new Primer, the absorbing 2004 indie from Shane Carruth, who reportedly assisted Johnson with some of Looper's time-travel elements .)
Primer, the 2004 cult item adored by geeks and ignored by most everyone else, seemed to take that as its subject, unveiling a wholly different, dizzyingly complicated way of looking at the problem.
Looper has new ideas in a genre that hasn’t had any since the 2004 indie time-travel movie Primer.
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With both its urban and rural-cornfield milieus marked by consuming bleakness, Looper harkens back to both Blade Runner and The Killers while nonetheless crafting its own unique spin on noir fatalism.
That said, all this film’s multilevel daring comes to a head when the two Joes face off over a diner table; it’s the mirror scene from “Duck Soup” for an age of personality crisis.
Time travel is always a tricky thing to deal with - internet nerds love dissecting the paradoxes and plotholes of The Terminator and Back To The Future series - and those people will have a ball with Looper, but on the face of it Johnson has done a superb job with the script, using its high-concept idea to explore notions of morality, the greater good, sacrifice, destiny, and the nature of evil.
We have had TIME CRIMES, the "Back to the Future" series, etc.
While time travel films aren't always done right, when they are they make one hell of an impact; the " Back to the Future " films, the " Terminator " films, " Donnie Darko ," " Time Bandits ," " Twelve Monkeys ," " Source Code ," and the fantastic little Spanish film " Timecrimes " are just a few examples.
The film's gritty look is courtesy of production designer Ed Verreaux, who worked on the "Back to the Future" franchise, and art director Jim Gelarden, the former Clevelander who spent years at the Great Lakes Theater Festival and has since worked on several films including "Seabiscuit" and "Spider-Man 3."
Johnson doesn't go the Back to the Future route when it comes to people meeting their future selves in the present.
It brings to mind films by Steven Spielberg (“Minority Report”) and Christopher Nolan (“Inception”) -– incredible company for Johnson to keep.
"Looper," on the other hand, aspires to achieve what dystopian kin like "Minority Report" accomplished: create a fully realized but familiar world filled with intriguing characters who grapple with a slew of moral dilemmas.
It’s a conundrum of a film, built on contemplative silliness and complete with whiplash-worthy tonal shifts and call backs to numerous famous films – among them “Blade Runner,” “The Terminator,” “Minority Report,” “Carrie,” and “Groundhog Day.” Writer-director Rian Johnson previously gave us the intentionally unintelligible “Brick,” a high school noir thriller (also starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and with “Looper,” he’s provided us with an equally dense exercise in reinvention through inversion.
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From H.G. Welles’ genre staple “The Time Machine” to Terry Gilliam’s twisted “Time Bandits,” the notion of time travel has always been romantic, a way to revisit the nostalgia of the past or to glimpse things to come.
While time travel films aren't always done right, when they are they make one hell of an impact; the " Back to the Future " films, the " Terminator " films, " Donnie Darko ," " Time Bandits ," " Twelve Monkeys ," " Source Code ," and the fantastic little Spanish film " Timecrimes " are just a few examples.
Despite the fact that Cid’s name is never written down for us, those who remember the old Charlton Heston movie El Cid may feel inklings of realization dawning about here.