Looper

Time travel is tough. It's one of mankind's most frequent fantasies, and yet we can't even come up with a general consensus over how it could even feasibly work. Do all possible timelines exist simultaneously? Can you change the past or the future? If you were to die in a previous time, would you just kind of pop out of existence in your present? The trope has been explored half to death, but it's still such an appealing and challenging concept.

Part of what made Looper so appealing - in addition to a great cast and a cool story - was the simplicity with which it handled the concept of time travel, a central element of its plot. Compared to Inception, another recent beloved sci-fi movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and plenty of mind-bending concepts, Looper is relatively straightforward. Sure, there's some narration, especially early on, explaining the gist of how this future world works with its time travel and telekinesis. But you don't spend the entire film getting hit over the head with new rules, exceptions to old rules, and unique situations for which all previously established rules do not apply.

(Side note. I loved Inception when I saw it in theaters, but within a few days of seeing it I had already begun to sour on it. By the time my future wife bought it on Blu-ray several months later I had no interest in even seeing it a second time; when I did watch it a second time, its numerous holes and flaws were glaring and obvious. Still, there are few movies I've ever walked away from feeling more impressed by than Inception. So, was it a great movie, a terrible movie, or some compromise of the two possibilities? I still don't know. Okay, enough about Inception. Side note over.)

I expect I'll end up souring on Looper a little bit, too, with time. Although it was far more straightforward than Inception and should hold up much better to repeated viewings, I'm already figuring out some contradictions and strange plot devices that I didn't really care about at first. Hey, no matter; Looper had something Inception didn't, which was a compelling narrative that superseded its gimmicky sci-fi set-up. And along with the narrative came some great subversion of my expectations. A good movie shouldn't telegraph its twists from half an hour of screen time away, but at the same time a good movie earns its own outcomes, if that makes sense. A deus ex machina climactic resolution is a cop-out, but a predictable vanilla conclusion is no treat either.

I guess what I'm trying to say - and here come some major spoilers, which I feel safe writing here since at least four other blog members have seen this movie - is that I love how Bruce Willis became the bad guy. It's not even that it happened gradually and you came to realize it suddenly; rather, he was a bad dude the entire time, and we were just rooting for him early on before coming to spend time on the farm with Emily Blunt and the kid. Early on, we root for Bruce Willis and think Joseph Gordon-Levitt is being a total asshole, dismissing all this advice and all these warnings form his future self so callously, and then worst of all just ready to shoot and kill his future self for some easy money and a carefree life. But by the end of the movie, it's like, wait a second - why do we give a shit if Bruce Willis dies? He made his bed long ago, and now it's time for him to sleep in it. Plus he's killing kids. It's misguided at best and horrifying in any case. For a movie to take the wisdom out of an "old man" character and replace it with a cold quest for vengeance was subtle, especially given Bruce Willis's charisma, and I'm sure I'm not alone when I say once I got to the end of the movie I realized I was no longer rooting for him, but couldn't remember when I had consciously stopped doing so.

At any rate, I thought this was a very solid movie. It wasn't perfect or anything, but few movies with this kind of ambition are.