After our short, basically worthless, talk on Looper for this week’s episode, I felt compelled to flesh out my thoughts on the movie a little further.
At face value, the first value you have to get past is Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s face. The prosthetic/computer manipulation of this face can be a little distracting, because you know it’s JGL under there, but it doesn’t look like him. So your brain is constantly mining the screen with your eye-drills to find some true nugget of pure Levitt ore or find the heart of the alchemy the producers were going for to smelt Levitt’s features into some Bruce Willis alloy.
Enough on that metaphor? Good, because the sooner you get by that the sooner you can get to the true silver of this movie. I’m done, I promise.
Looper isn’t really a time travel movie, it just has time travel in it. It isn’t really a futuristic movie, it just has the future in it (sort of). It isn’t really a hitman movie, a gangster movie, an etc. etc. movie, it just has etc. in it.
That is kind of what makes it a good movie. There are a lot of layers that make it an interesting movie to try to pick apart in one sitting. Which is why I will probably be going back to watch it in the next chance I get, just to delve a little deeper.
From here on out, there be spoilers.
I’m going to jump around to parts I want to talk about, if you want the whole story, go watch the damn movie
In 2044 time travel doesn’t exist, but in 2074 it does, but is illegal. So only criminals use it, they send back people to be killed because disposing of bodies in the future is extremely hard to do, due to trackers or some such stuff.
Joe (young version: Levitt, old version: Willis) is a Looper. Which are basically hitmen, that are the silver screen equivalent of a camper in any first person shooter video game. They stand in a spot where they know someone will be and they wait for them to show up, then shoot them and take their reward. You find out fairly quickly that the last kill that Loopers make is they kill the future version of themselves, get a big payday (not the candy bar, a bunch of gold bars) and then spend the next 30 years of their life partying or whatever until they get sent back. This seemed like a strange ass setup to me.
I assume this is the premise seed that grew the whole movie tree, but it wasn’t really explained in a fashion that made any sense. “To close their loop” isn’t a good explanation, it is just slang for the explanation that everyone else seems to understand. But the fruit of this movie tree is tasty, so I won’t complain too much.
As often is the point with movies set in the near future, much of the world is similar to now. But there are some things that felt a little off to me. Being a car guy the automobiles bugged me a little bit. Young Joe’s daily driver is what most citizens seem to have, a current day vehicle (2008 to present) that have some cables and wires coming out of the gas cap and other parts of the car. I assumed this meant some kind of electric breakthrough revolutionized the auto industry, but when cars drive they sounded like standard gas-powered cars to me. But there are also hover bikes, which are apparently huge pieces of shit.
And the fact that Joe’s “covered with a tarp – sweet, weekend machine” car in the movie is played by a fucking Mazda Miata, leads me to believe that the auto industry came to a sudden and cataclysmic end that destroyed any cars that are actually pretty AND fun to drive.
But, that’s just a tiny point that few people will even notice.
A surprising, seemingly small plot point, that turns out to be a fairly large part of Joe’s future, is the revelation that a small percentage of the population are TKs (telekinetics). Joe describes the power, that one of the other Loopers has, as pretty lame, because all anyone (mostly) can do is float quarters.
As it turns out whispers Joe has been hearing about a new crime boss in the future, called the Rainmaker, has been “closing loops” at an alarming rate and young Joe comes face to face with old Joe (who is apparently way more badass than young Joe). In their first meeting Old Joe, despite being on his knees and weighed down with a back-load of gold, quickly bested his younger self.
In some kind of paradox rewind/fast forward or wormhole sneak peek you get to see Joe’s 30 year future after he shoots his old self in the field, what seems like ages before he later shoots his current self in a different field.
You get to see what brings a man, who had no problem essentially signing his life away at one point, back to fight his younger self to lengthen his future that should have been.
Since Joe Young (not the mighty monkey) failed to kill Joe Old they are both being hunted by Abe (not Lincoln, Jeff Daniels) and his team of gangsters; including a sniveling, twirpy guy “Kid Blue,” whose character worked well for me because I just hated his whole being from the start, and a short appearance by an actor I like seeing play the bad ass, Garret Dillahunt. He appears as another bounty hunter type in the house of the boy who grows up to be the Rainmaker, who Joe is trying to protect/kill so he can live-his-own-life/have-his-old-future. It is from this little TK powerhouse (nuclear rated) of a kid that Dillahunt’s swaggering bit character, Jesse, meets a floating…gooey end.
While the first gen of TK people are weaklings this chubby-cheeked, bowl-cut monster can float every object in a room AND turn a man into a new thin, dripping style of red wallpaper that probably won’t catch on.
The kid, Cid, is played quite well by Pierce Gagnon, especially in his house-shattering bitch fits, during an early one of which you see his mom run and lock herself into a safe. A lot of times little kids trying to look angry is comical, but give this little dude a toothbrush mustache and he’d pull off a pretty good Hitler. Razor sharp little baby teeth and staring up through his eyebrows, it’ll cause you to pause, because Cid don’t fuck around.
Like I said, the time travel is just kind of there, it’s nothing new to go back to a time when there wasn’t time travel, Willis has done it previously in the slightly twisted pic 12 Monkeys, but in Looper sending people back in time is the stand-in for the trunk of Lincoln Continental. Somehow, that squeaky rat has got to get to the dock for his cement shoe fitting or to a field to be shot in the chest with a blunderbuss.
Which was another thing I like and didn’t like at the same time. I appreciated the throwback, but in this verging on dystopian setting I can’t imagine gun control has suddenly caught on. Sure, the boss dude might only want them to use short range guns, but any man who KILLS PEOPLE FOR A LIVING would probably have more than a little pea-shooter as a backup piece.
Overall, it was worth seeing and I’ll probably see it again, just for sheer enjoyment.
Another Trivial Conversation - ATCpod 