"Looper"

If you could go back to any point in history, what would you change?  How would you do it?

What if it was the other way around; if you were faced with someone telling you that you were going to damn the future?  What would you do?

A few days ago, I wrote a post about “Primer” and about the different types of time travel stories. One aspect of time travel stories that I neglected to acknowledge was that of perspective.  The time travel aspects which I mentioned in that post all had the same perspective: the time traveler is the protagonist. However, there are a whole set of stories, few as they may be, where the time traveler is the antagonist. They’ve come back in time to change history, reshape it the way they want, and the protagonist is the one who has to stop them from hurting those who get in their way.

Prior to “Looper”, the two notable films of this type are those in the “Terminator” franchise, and the latest “Star Trek” film. In the “Terminator” films, a series of successively more sophisticated robot assassins from a post-apocalyptic future controlled by machines are sent back to kill the leader of the future human resistance at different points in his life. In the second of these films, we find that scientists who had found the technology left after the first assassin’s destruction are now developing the science which will eventually lead to the future from whence it came.  In the latest “Star Trek” film, when the last survivors from the destruction of a planet are pulled back in time by the technology which was intended to save it, their very presence alters the timeline irrevocably, altering the destinies of the series’ characters along with an entire race.

With “Looper”, filmmaker Rian Johnson brings an original aspect to this type of story:  What do you do when that threat from the future is you?

“Looper” is the third film to be written and directed by Rian Johnson.  Johnson debuted in 2005 with “Brick”.  “Brick” is a revelation: a noir mystery thriller in the best style Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays the sleuth; a student with a talent for getting information and solving problems at a high school embroiled with drugs and crime, enlisted for help by an old flame who then goes missing. The story is a complete noir world with all the best earmarks of the genre, including the raffish sleuth, the arcane crime boss, the relentless tough, and the duplicitous femme fatale, but set (and by set, I mean embedded tightly) in a high school, and with a clever slang all of it’s own, giving this film a style all it’s own. Johnson could not have shown more potential as a new filmmaker; he had created a world in the film.

In his followup film, “The Brothers Bloom”, Johnson delves into a different type of noir film: the caper. For the uninitiated, the caper is the story of the committing of a crime.  The most critically acclaimed of these is “The Sting”, and the most widely known currently would be “Ocean’s Eleven”. In a caper, a band of thieves, con artists and other disreputables conspire against a whale and/or a heavy, to take the whale’s money and to at least embarrass or, more often, get out from under the thumb of the heavy. In the two aforementioned films, the whale and the heavy are one and the same; a power broker against whom our rapscallion heroes seek to make a retaliatory strike with the reward of long money. However, in “The Brothers Bloom”, our merry band of miscreants are the titular brothers, Stephen and Bloom; grifters of literary esteem and endowment; the whale is a charmingly whimsical and bubbly millionaire heiress shut-in; and the heavy is the nefarious ‘Diamond Dog’, world-renowned thief, con-man and criminal mastermind who wants the boys either dead or back in his fold, but who Stephen wants to see dead and Bloom just wants to be out from under.  Stephen is the orchestrator, writing his cons “with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and shit” with Bloom as his ever-suffering sidekick, unable to have any sort of real life, wanting out.

With Johnson’s latest film, “Looper”, his penchant for noir falls second to a story of time travel, and, therefore, of regret. However, the story is original on multiple fronts. In this film, Johnson’s noir considerations take the form of a mob story, a tale of drug addicts turned into assassins, brought into a ‘family’, given one extended contract: eighty-six whoever they’re sent at a given time and place. Just so happens they’re being sent from 30 years in the future. They’re sent their kills with their payment and, after enough, they’re sent one last job: their future self, and get paid enough to be set up for the next thirty years. They’re called ‘loopers’ because, when they do their last job, they’ve ‘closed their loop’.

Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis both play Joe, a looper. Levitt plays the young Joe, before his loop has closed. Willis plays old Joe, who, when he gets taken to be ‘closed’, fights back, and goes back anyway, hoping to change things, make them better; to take down the tenebrous overlord who has degraded the future in which he’s grown old. When Old Joe gets away from his younger self, Young Joe is on the lamb from the ‘family’ and chasing after the old man to close his loop and get back in.  Meanwhile, Old Joe is tracking down his mysterious enemy; a talented and dangerous telekinetic who is, in Young Joe’s time, no more than a child, and taking on the ‘family’ at the same time.

“Looper” is part “12 Monkeys”, part “Terminator”, part “Fugitive”, part “Pulp Fiction”. Like “Brick” and “The Brothers Bloom” before it, the characters play like a Chandler or a Hammett or an Elmore Leonard. The continuities and causalities are brilliant, they would make even H.G. Wells’ or Einstein's head’s spin.

What is most impressive is the scale.  As incredible as “Brick” was, it was very small; a few small sets, basic locations, small cast.  “The Brothers Bloom” was not much larger, however, it did boast some beautiful locations.  This is his first ‘big budget’ film: futuristic settings, superhero effects, incredible stunts.

And to whoever it was that made Joseph Gordon Levitt up to look like Bruce Willis did it perfectly.