Film Looper

[P A]

A movie that I had predicted would be another hackneyed, low-concept CGI/sci-fi bonanza turned out to be one of the best films I've seen this year. Considering its relatively meager budget of $30,000,000 (cf. Prometheus's budget of 130 mil; about 4.3 times as much), film-making of this quality is more than worthy of all the praise.

From the Wikipedia article of the same name:

Looper is a 2012 American science fiction action film written and directed by Rian Johnson. The film stars Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Emily Blunt. In Looper, time travel is invented by the year 2074 and, though immediately outlawed, is used by criminal organizations to send those they want killed into the past where they are killed by "loopers", assassins paid with silver bars strapped to their targets. Joe, a looper, encounters himself when his older self is sent back in time to 2044.

What do you think, F&T?

 

[L2R]

the first third was terribly exciting, the second third got boring and the last part just was just really silly and they fuck up the paradox problem by making it inconsistent with the demonstration in the first part. i was disappointed. 2/5

 

[P A]

I think you're selling it short, L2R. I agree that the third act's contrivance was ridiculous on many levels if you accept it at face value. The movie tried very, very hard to confuse me and failed miserably. I wasn't confused, I was just bitter. Upon walking-out-of-the-theater reflection, however, I began to wonder whether the final scenes were intended to serve a more allegorical purpose, making the 'circle' to which Joe referred basically metaphorical. If that was the case, then I can't really find too much fault in the script. Since everything else (acting, cinematography, choreography, futuristic vision) was more or less spot on, I give it a solid 4/5.

 

[Belisarius]

Just got back from this. My verdict: A stunning film, better in my ranking than Inception, which I don't say lightly. JLG's mimicry of Willis's expressions and mannerisms falls mercifully short of caricature, and it works, and this was one of the rare SF futures that felt truly real (time travel aside, of course). Frightening on many levels, and--if you think about it--intensely existentialist. It has its flaws, to be sure,

NSFW:

(stormtrooper effect, an uneasy blend of science and magic with "TK")

but they aren't enough for me to gift it with less than a solid five stars. Will see it again in the theaters for certain, if only to catch what I missed.

 

[Mysterie]

easy 4/5 from me

entertaining all throughout and some scenes rlly astounded me

 

[P A]

stormtrooper effect

If you're referring to Roger Ebert's 'Principle of Evil Marksmanship,' I don't know - I was on the lookout for this one, but I found that Willis'/Levitt's Joe missed almost as often as their (presumably) less skilled counterparts, usually narrowly escaping certain death by a combination of superior firepower and/or external assistance.

an uneasy blend of science and magic with "TK"

If you're ever fortunate enough to read e.g., a PKD novel, you'll be surprised at how enthusiastically the New Wave et al. incorporated psi phenomena into much of their work (cf. Ubik, VALIS). Since this movie felt almost obnoxiously PKD-inspired through and through, I couldn't resist making the intuitive connection, which connection actually made the TK stuff much easier to stomach. But yeah, I typically can't stand that sort of thing...

 

[Belisarius]

1.) Good call on the PKD similarities. I have a copy of Ubik that I haven't read yet.
2.)

NSFW:

I'm referring more to the scene where Old Joe takes out dozens of armed men without even getting winged--the same thing that ruined Equilibrium for me. The earlier scenes show more realistic shooting, though.

 

[DrinksWithEvil]

i loved it best movie ive seen all year also, i liked it more than the master. 4.5/5

NSFW:

the scene where the rain man(kid) kills that dude with his powers up in there air,is fucking epic

 

[Belisarius]

Here's a story with a great explanatory infographic, by the same guy who did the explanatory Inception graphic. It's pretty much what I put together during the film, but still might help those who were / are a little lost:

http://www.film.com/movies/looper-infographic

 

[P A]

NSFW:

I'm referring more to the scene where Old Joe takes out dozens of armed men without even getting winged--the same thing that ruined Equilibrium for me. The earlier scenes show more realistic shooting, though.

lol, yeah, I suspected as much. "That particular bit of cheese notwithstanding," I should've added.

Here's a story with a great explanatory infographic, by the same guy who did the explanatory Inception graphic

Spoiler: pretension; snobbery

You know, I've refrained from saying anything before now (mostly out of fear of sounding incredibly pompous), but I just can't help myself: Were Inception and Looper truly so Byzantine in their narrative depth and complexity that they require accompanying graphics for clarity? I mean Jeebus, how hard could it possibly be? One movie involves the dream version of an onion. Another is a pretty standard popcorn time travel flick. Did children of the 80s require graphic guides for Back to the Future? For Blade Runner? I hate to sound all sanctimonious, but heaven forbid any of these moviegoers read a novel with greater narrative convolution than The Cat in the Hat.

 

[Belisarius]

^
To be fair, I don't think we should overlook the artist's intention to have a little fun making a graphic. He certainly didn't do it for pay.

As an aside, a lot of viewers have been pointing out something that should've been obvious to me (though the movie never explicitly states it):

NSFW:

That Kid Blue is Abe's past self.

 

[P A]

^No doubt. I don't find any fault with the artist, but rather, the apparent necessity (for some viewers) of the material that the artist produced. It's a saddening and frustrating trend to have to witness, that's all. For movies like Primer, I can understand the impulse to resort to a handy 'viewer's guide' or a clever infographic, but Inception? It's a by-the-books sci-fi/heist genre movie with a (basically) linear plot that advances more-or-less step by fucking step, explaining just about everything along the way, almost to a fault. If Nolan had packed any more technical exposition into the movie, it would've been a poor man's Waking Life sans existentialism.

 

[L2R]

you know i could live with that added contrivance at the end, i picked up on some metaphoric intentions strongly throughout which i appreciate, i just can't get over the one failure on the thing i had the highest hopes for, the time travel element.

let me specify.

Spoiler: looper

-the first bloke who lets himself get away, he's captured and mutilated, causing that very interesting and spectacular deterioration of his older self. this concept is interesting in how questionable it is. that is, if a guy has his nose cut off in his past, let alone his limbs, he would not be where he was in the present trying to reach himself. his whole timeline would have been fucked up and he would have never even arrived in the present in the first place. but even granting this, say this paradox mechanism works in this way, so that present effects only present, i found this a seriously interesting concept.
-but then they changed it for the last scene. they changed it! bruce willis doesn't drop with a hole in his head, he vanishes. this means that his past has been completely changed, which is a mechanism contrary to that in the above scene.

i love pkd's writings (the ones i have read, and intend to do many more). i can appreciate the attempt to homage pkd, but they don't come close to taking it where it goes.

saw another time travel film tonight "safety not guaranteed". it fell way short of my sci-fi hopes, with it being more of a rom-com (you'd love it, bel!), but what little it did have on the concept was both solid and interesting.

 

[P A]

failure on the thing i had the highest hopes for, the time travel element.

A few critics have been quick to point up the diner scene in which Young Joe attempts to sort through the all the philosophical/commonsensical vagaries and paradoxes of time travel with his older self, only to be rhetorically smacked down by the grisly old man, something along the lines of "We don't have time for that shit! We need to [get you on a train, kill people to stop this and that from happening in the future, etc.]. It comes off as a kind of subtle, fourth-wall-breaking nod-nod-wink-wink dismissal of the technical contradictions latent within every time travel story, which serves to refocus the minds of both Young Joe and the viewer upon the more 'important' objectives in/of the film: Blowing shit up, killing children, blunderbusses, drug withdrawal, personal relationships, and the ways that preternaturally gritty humans respond to tremendous physical and emotional hardship. Since all of those features were present in spades, I cannot lower myself to give the movie 2/5, especially after it made its own narrative goals patently clear from the beginning of the second act.

TL;DR - I honestly don't see Looper as a time travel movie any more than I view Inglourious Basterds as a piece of historical fiction, or Prometheus as a low-concept sci-fi adventure flick. They all pretend to be one thing at the outset, and turn out to be something much, much more nuanced and interesting to watch.

 

[twentysix]

I was willing to overlook some of the stuff that just didn't make sense for the simple fact that it was really cool to watch. One if my all time favorites. Maybe.

 

[L2R]

i could easily overlook the weird initial mechanism i mentioned if only it had stayed consistent. i hate it when a movie breaks its own rules, whatever they are.

 

[Belisarius]

Re L2R:

NSFW:

Concerning deterioration vs. disappearance: I think the key is that there is a *direct* connection between the past and future selves, that they are literally the same person. You couldn't scar one without scarring the other--and if the scars are survivable, so much the better. Carried to its logical conclusion, Old Seth could only disintegrate like that if there was some kind of "new" timeline in which he was kept alive in a dismembered state for 30 years, until he was sent back. That this mutilated Old Seth was not the one that Young Seth saw doesn't really matter, because that mutilated Old Seth didn't exist yet--not until the present imposed on his future. Perhaps even as Old Seth was getting mutilated he was getting new "memories" of living a lifetime with no limbs.

As for disappearance, I think the explanation (and only a "movie explanation" at that) is that, like Terminator, maybe you can't send dead things back. Even if you could, killing Young Joe would mean that there would be no Old Joe to go back in time; he'd already be a decomposed corpse or ashes somewhere.

RE PA:

few critics have been quick to point up the diner scene in which Young Joe attempts to sort through the all the philosophical/commonsensical vagaries and paradoxes of time travel with his older self, only to be rhetorically smacked down by the grisly old man, something along the lines of "We don't have time for that shit! We need to [get you on a train, kill people to stop this and that from happening in the future, etc.].

Ditto. I think this is an element in all time-travel stories to some degree, whether it's the mechanism for doing it (usually glossed over by even skilled authors), or the philosophically and physically rigorous implications and consequences (typically only one or two key aspects are focused on). Take one of my favorite novels, Robert Silverberg's Up the Line, which is one big mind-trip about time travel paradoxes.* The gist of the story is that in the future, the Time Service both polices the timeline and provides tours of any point in the past to groups of paying customers. Naturally, these customers want to see famous events like the Crucifixion, famous battles, the Black Death, etc. The novel points out a paradox about this: that the longer time travel exists the more people will go back to these famous events, including the tour guides themselves, until theoretically you could have crowds of thousands or millions of tourists from the future (including multiple copies of yourself) witnessing the Crucifixion. Yet, this doesn't happen, and the novel basically drops it as handwavium in favor of other, more interesting consequences in the plot (which I highly recommend, if you can look past the more deviant aspects of the narrator's sexuality).

*Minor book and movie spoiler.

NSFW:

It even has some similarities with Looper; the Time Service punishes "time crime" by retroactively erasing offenders from existence.

 

[P A]

i could easily overlook the weird initial mechanism i mentioned if only it had stayed consistent. i hate it when a movie breaks its own rules, whatever they are.

To add to Belisarius' explanation:

Spoiler: Looper

By the end of the movie, it was my impression that the purpose of the various life-support machines to which we saw Seth hooked up when the door was cracked open was not to ensure Seth's comfort (anesthesia, etc.) during his dismemberment, but rather to prolong his life indefinitely - or for ~30 years, to be precise. In the case of Young Joe's suicide, there were no life-support devices. Ergo, Young Joe's corpse simply rots, leaving Old Joe with no body left to spontaneously scar/deteriorate, since by the time he could have aged to ~60, he would've been long-decomposed.

 

[L2R]

ok, i'll grant that one, P A. still sits a bit funny with me, but hey it makes the best of the situation, which i don't mind doing.

 

[P A]

^Yeah, I don't know, man; I feel like I have vested interest in maintaining this movie's reputation now that I've gone and made a whole thread about it...

P A, Looper shill.