Director: Rian Johnson
Genre: Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Rating: A+
Lately I've been watching a lot of movies that I've either found to be outright bad or else simply not good. A lot of them have failed to meet my expectations - a lot have made me question my expectations. Looper is not one of these movies. In fact, Looper is one of those movies that just absolutely blew my mind. It is everything that a time travel movie should be. Everything that a science fiction movie should be. Everything that a movie should be.
In the not too distant future time travel will have been invented. Immediately outlawed it is only used by the mob when they wish to get rid of someone; they send the person back in time, thirty years, where a looper executes them. Sometimes the mob wishes to close loops; they seek out former loopers and send them back to be executed by themselves. The looper is then given a sum of gold and the next thirty years to live out their life. One day Joe (Gordon-Levitt) discovers that his loop is being closed and makes the unforgivable mistake of letting his elder self (Willis) escape. Joe must find himself and kill him before it's too late - and all he has to go on is a piece of a map with a farm belonging to a woman named Sara (Blunt) and her son Cid (Pierce Gagnon).
This movie did not meet my expectations. I went into it thinking that it was going to be about one thing and go in one direction and be good at what it did, maybe even great. It didn't take me long to realize that it wasn't going in that direction at all and after a bit of discomfort I went with it - and I'm glad I did. What Looper did was so much better than what I was expecting it to be. It's so intricate and complicated and yet so amazing.
I love the world that they created here. It's the future and has a lot of the typical futuristic elements that you expect - time travel, telekinesis, hovercars - but it also has a lot of really old world elements. There's a lot to it that makes it feel like it's set in the 30s or 40s instead of the future, which I felt was just a really nice touch. The movie doesn't over do the sci-fi or the futuristic elements, making things feel a lot more real than they do in most sci-fi movies. Sure, time travel hasn't been invented yet an people can't make coins float, but a lot of what happens in Looper feels like it could be real. A lot of the characters feel like real people. The issues maybe not so much, but definitely the people.
The thing that really wowed me about Looper, though, was the ending. It was something that I didn't see coming at all - aided heavily by the fact that I spent at least half the movie not exactly sure who I wanted to win or how I thought things were going to play out. I had some elements of things figured out before hand, but not most of it so the ending was just this amazing surprise. Looper distracts you, making you think about possibilities for some things and thus leaves you rather blindsided by other things. Oh! And another thing that's awesome about this movie is Joseph Gordon-Levitt himself, and all the detail that they put into making him look like Bruce Willis. I've watched Bruce Willis films for a long time now and Gordon-Levitt really reminded me of the other actor when he was younger. The fact that they even had similar mannerisms and spoke in a similar way just made it all that much better. You often see movies that have a young and an old version of the same character (although, rarely do they share scenes), but never before have I seen a film go to such lengths in order to ensure that they were so easily identifiable as being the same person. It was that detail that really sold this movie for me in the trailers, and it was that detail that really helped sell the movie itself.
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