Looper(2012)- User Reviews

Time-travel movies - or movies with time travel elements - can go one of three ways, generally:

1) The well thought-out variety. They often contain lots of little twists, sometimes travel back and forth, and usually either spawn an alternate reality, eventually get everything back on track the way it was supposed to go in the original timeline, or cram new events into the existing timeline that do not alter the original outcome (12 Monkeys, Back to the Future, The Butterfly Effect, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Red vs. Blue, etc). These are the best type of time travel movie, in my opinion, because they're creative and because they are obviously trying to make an interesting story that also makes sense.

2) Movies that don't even try to make things make sense, or adhere to any rules. They usually leave lots of plot holes and / or change the original events to fit their needs (JJ Abrams' Star Trek, for example). I dislike this type of movie because it seems very lazy. It's easy to reboot something because the story you want to tell doesn't fit into canon, but I dislike it because it always seems like the movie makers had an opportunity. A) We can try to be really creative and find a way to make this work and be very interesting, or B) we can just say screw it, erase everything that's already been established as having happened in this universe and make things go our way, regardless of whether or not they make sense (old Spock just *happens* to get banished to the same lonely ice planet where Scotty's stationed?)

3) Movies like "Looper", which want to try to avoid being a # 2 movie, and focus on characters / minutiae more than the time travel itself or the effects thereof. This smacks of "gimmick" to me. They use the time travel angle to draw people in, and then ignore the time travel part in order to tell a different story.

And the premise is interesting: In the future time travel has been invented and outlawed, and so therefore only the outlaws use time travel. Now, it seems to me that criminals in the future would have a better use for time travel than a convenient body disposal service (which is young Joe's job), but okay, I can roll with it. Part of going to the movies is suspending your disbelief. So no problem. Young Joe (Gordon-Levitt) gets a time each day where he goes to a predetermined location to kill some poor slob the bad guys 30 years in the future are sending back to him. One day, the person sent back for him to whack is himself (Willis). A 30 years older version of himself, who does a Logan's Run instead of submitting to the hit. You can get all of that from the trailer.

But then the movie alters and goes through a couple of stages. The middle stage is where the plot gets a bit muddy and disorganized, and things stop making sense. I'll get to more of that in a minute (under the spoilers section). The third stage / act is where *good* time travel movies really get into the mind-bending possibilities and revelations. Looper chose to step away from the time travel aspect altogether, instead focusing on characters introduced halfway through the movie and making them the object of the final third. It strikes me as an opportunity missed, and also a bit of a cop-out. Again...we had the chance to do something neat, something new, but instead we took the easy way out.

* * * The following contains full spoilers for the movie * * *

Halfway through the movie we hear about the character "The Rain Maker"...a mysterious figure in the future who takes over the city and starts "closing all of the loops". I honestly can't recall if we're ever told *why* the Rain Maker wants to close all of the loops. I guess it didn't matter? Young Joe learns of the Rain Maker from Old Joe, and also learns of Old Joe's plans to find the Rain Maker in the present (when he's still a kid) and kill him, so that he never grows up to be the Rain Maker who goes around closing the loops. His motive is to save his wife, who was an innocent bystander killed when the bad guys came to collect him in the future.

So literally the whole last third of this movie is about Old Joe trying to get to (and kill) this little boy named Sid, who will one day be the Rain Maker, and Young Joe's mission to stop him (pretty much only so that he can close his loop and get back to his own life, which has been thrown into chaos by his older self). We abandon the time travel element altogether until the very last moment of the climax...an event which sets everything on its ear.

Which leads me to all of the problems I mentioned in the 2nd stage / middle part of the movie. Yes, I know time travel is impossible and how you're supposed to suspend disbelief, and many people will say you can't point out plot holes in a time travel movie for those reasons. But I think they're wrong. I think that because there have been plenty of movies (some of the ones named above, for example) that have pulled it off successfully. There are time travel movies that leave you astounded and full of admiration for the creativity of the screenplay. They tease your imagination and honestly do their best to address any issues or holes left in the plot. Even if they fail, or something doesn't quite work, at least they gave it a shot.

The less creative movies just want you to forget about the problems, the things that don't work, etc. As such, they never even address them. THAT'S my real problem with Looper, and movies like it. It's that they didn't even try to come up with an explanation.

I am perfectly willing to suspend disbelief, and I'll accept any rules you give me for your universe, but then you have to abide by those rules and make it work. Otherwise it takes me out of the story because I'm faced with a big fat Thing That Does Not Make Sense.

For example...vampires. Anyone ever watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer? In season one we get all of the rules. They can't go out in direct sunlight. They don't need to breathe. They have no heartbeat. So we can infer certain things from that. If there's no heartbeat, then blood is not getting circulated around the body, right? They don't *need* to breathe, but they do take in air in order to speak, yes? It's the passage of air over the vocal chords that allows speech. So you can imagine my frustration when Angel and Xander find a (temporarily) dead Buffy, and Angel (who is visibly panting) tells Xander that he'll have to do CPR, because Angel himself "has no breath". But...you're panting. You're obviously taking air in and breathing it back out. You're speaking with it. In fact, your air would be better for her than Xander's, because you haven't taken any oxygen from it into your lungs!

So that's where I'm coming from. I need stuff to make sense, otherwise it takes me out of the story. They need to at least attempt to address the issue to make it believable. And there are just too many things that happen in this movie that go unaddressed.

For example (and here's the BIG spoiler, folks, so be warned), Young Joe ultimately stops Old Joe from killing Sid by turning his gun on himself. He kills himself there in the present, so that he never grows into Old Joe, and will therefore never come back to try to kill Sid.

Okay.

So...what? If Old Joe never came back to the present, then how did any of the movie just happen? Looper isn't the only movie to have ever done anything like this...The Butterfly Effect is a good example. After the whole movie, with the main character trying desperately over and over again to change events for the better (and ultimately realizing he can't), he ultimately goes back to the earliest moment he can and makes sure none of the events ever happen. It creates a whole other present. And that works, because it's following its own rules.

This..doesn't, really. By his action, Young Joe shows us that present-day actions DO have a direct result on the future. Old Joe vanishes the moment Young Joe kills himself. Old Joe never existed. But if Old Joe never existed, then how did he come back and kill Abe (Jeff Daniels) and all of the gat-men? And if he never came back and never presented a problem in the first place, then events would never have led to Young Joe having to kill himself.

This isn't the only conundrum. Near the beginning, Young Joe's best friend faces a similar problem. His older self comes back, and he lets him go instead of killing him. He eventually gets caught by the gat-men, and they use him to draw his older self to his death. They do this in a dramatic and effective scene where they send a message to his old self via carving instructions into his young self's arm. The scar instantly shows up on the older looper. He tries to get there as fast as he can, but suddenly he starts losing fingers, losing his nose, losing one foot at a time, then his legs. By the time he gets where he's going, he's little more than a dismembered trunk. Each amputation is decades old, healed over.

Again, very interesting and effective scene. But there are problems. 1) Why did the old him rush to get there, anyway? His death might ensure that his younger self gets to live, but could they really have killed his younger self, anyway? Even by being drastically mutilated the way he has been, isn't the younger self going to live a very different life than he would have in the original timeline? Don't things like that effect the future? If we're really meant to believe that Young Joe can instantly erase Old Joe by shooting himself, then yes, it should. 2) Now that Abe and all of the gat-men are dead (at the end of the movie), what happens to Joe's multiple-amputee friend? Who's going to take care of him for the next 30 years? Except wait...if he's sent back in 30 years, now he'll be a trunk of a man. He won't be able to run away from his younger self. He won't be able to steal a car and race back to Wire street to prevent his younger self from getting killed.

The biggest issue for me, is that final act of Young Joe changing the future. He wipes himself out. He creates a future in which Sid doesn't grow up to be the Rain Maker. But if the Rain Maker never comes into power, then he never starts closing all of the loops. If he never closes all of the loops, then the actions that set the movie into action never happened.

Again...this is a problem in other time travel movies, too, but good ones attempt to address it. It doesn't have to SOLVE the problem, just give the viewer some kind of insight. Terminator 2, for example. Pretty much the same thing happens. They are successful in destroying the original Terminator's arm and brain chip. Cyberdine goes up in flames. They have *changed the future* so that Skynet should never become self aware, and so should therefore never send terminators back into the past. If they never did that, then Kyle Reese should never have been sent back to protect Sarah Connor, in which case John would never have been conceived, and the none of the events in Terminator or T2 should have happened, right? Well, Sarah addresses that at the end of the second movie. "I don't know what will happen, now," she says. They're facing an uncertain future. She has no idea what sort of repercussions there might be. And no, it's not an answer. But it's a resolution to that question. It shows that the characters are thinking of it. They're aware of it, and they're wondering, too. It helps the viewer stay in the movie and accept those characters as realistic. It sparks the imagination instead of leaving a bunch of gaping holes.

So...yeah. That's how I feel about Looper, lol. It wasn't a *bad* movie. Some of the scenes were interesting. Bruce Willis does a great job being Bruce Willis (with one very nicely acted moment after he kills the first of the kids on his list who could later become the Rain Maker...hm, now that I think of it, Willis is sort of like the Terminator, isn't he?!). Joseph Gordon-Levitt does an amazing job of playing a young Bruce Willis. Seriously. I mean, I know he's got some prosthetic pieces to make him *look* more like Bruce Willis, but he also does a great job sounding like him and making his expressions. There are some scenes where he's posing (just standing there, really) and the way he's holding himself, his body language, it's Bruce Willis all over. Really outstanding. Emily Blunt is nothing special in the requisite plot device / love interest role. In fact, there are three women in this whole movie, and all of them are love interests (sex interest in 2 out of the 3 cases) of Joe. Jeff Daniels...well, who doesn't like Jeff Daniels? Even as the kingpin bad guy, he's still sort of lovable.

But for those claiming Looper is the next Matrix? Dream on.