TIFF 2012 Review: LOOPER Exceeds Expectations
In the year 2044 America has become a darker, grimmer version of its current self. It is a nation driven by fear and the sharp division between the rich and poor. It's an eat or be eaten world where weapons are borne openly on the street, drugs are readily available, and while technology has progressed almost nobody can afford it. It is a world where even evolutionary progress seems to have disappointed, one where - yes - telekinetic powers have developed but only to the degree that those so gifted can levitate coins.
In this world young Joe Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) not only survives but prospers by working as a looper.
The concept works like this. Thirty years farther into the future time travel has been created but judged so dangerous that it has been outlawed. And so it is gone from the legal market but very much present in the criminal underworld. When a future criminal needs to make someone disappear they do so literally. They load them into a time machine - hooded and bound and with silver bars strapped to their back - to a set place and time where a looper awaits them with a gun. Person appears, looper fires then collects the silver and disposes of the body. Neat. Clean. No murder in the future, dead guy never officially existed in the past. It's the perfect crime.
But for Joe and others like him this lifestyle comes at a cost. At some point - they never know when - their future bosses will decide their services are no longer required. And when that happens it is time to close the loop. The looper's future self is found and sent back to be killed, the young looper none the wiser until they see that their customary payment has been delivered in gold rather than silver. Their old self dead, the young self is released from their contract and sent off to live a comfortable life for the next thirty years on the profits from their gold. Should they decline or fail to kill themselves? Well, that's an option best not entertained.
And yet that is what happens to Joe. He arrives at the designated time and space only to find that his appointment is late, eventually arriving while Joe is checking his watch. Arriving without his hands bound. Without his hood in place. Leaving Joe standing eye to eye with his future self (Bruce Willis). And the moment of hesitation as this registers is all that future-Joe needs to act, to overpower young-Joe and flee into the city. Meaning young-Joe has failed to close the loop. Meaning young-Joe is now on the run for his own life, scrambling to understand what went wrong in the first place so that he can track himself down, kill his older self and hopefully get the life he knew and was comfortable in back.
Writer-director Rian Johnson has accomplished something truly remarkable with his third feature film, Looper. He has delivered a thrilling, entertaining, action packed scifi thriller that is also incredibly smart and he has made it look easy. Looper is an exercise in world building par excellence, a film that is completely engrossing and rewarding on its own terms.
There are many keys to the success of Looper but the primary element is acknowledged directly in Johnson's script with both Joes seated opposite one another in a remote diner. Gordon-Levitt's young-Joe immediately peppers Willis' old-Joe with questions. What is the experience like for you? Do you know what I'm going to do? How does your memory work? Good questions, all, but questions which the elder Joe dismisses with a brusque, "I don't want to talk about time travel shit. We'll just end up drawing diagrams with straws." It seems like little more than a throwaway joke but it reveals something very central to Johnson's priorities here. It's very clear that someone spent a great deal of time having those time travel conversations and drawing those diagrams while Looper was being developed. Great pains have been taken to make sure that the core concepts are clear and neat and follow their own logic. But after having done so Johnson has remembered what so many others forget: The time travel gimmick is ultimately a gimmick. It's setting. It's not what the film is really about. And so, having established the rules he then pushes all of the ins and outs into the background to get at what's really important, and that's the characters.
Johnson is very clearly a character driven writer and an actor's director and every single role here is put on the page in beautiful detail and then delivered to perfection by a uniformly stellar cast. Willis and Gordon-Levitt are absolutely remarkable in the leads, the audience never doubting for a second that these two actors are actually the same man. Likewise Emily Blunt - whose character I am deliberately choosing not to talk about - delivers a powerful, nuanced, conflicted performance. Even when you step away from the leads the cast impresses. Paul Dano, Jeff Bridges, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo and the great Garrett Dillahunt - in my mind one of the greatest and most consistently overlooked character actors in the world today - all deliver stellar renditions of wonderfully complex and realistic characters.
Johnson also proves himself remarkably adept at handling action, the film maintaining a strong sense of pace from start to finish with a number of complex set pieces sure to get the adrenaline flowing. While the goal is very clearly to keep the action as grounded and realistic as possible Looper also makes very good use of special effects when required with a number of scenes executed so well they are sure to draw gasps from the audience.
Looper does not succeed because of its innovation. Yes, it has a clever central concept but let's be honest: It's a time travel movie and virtually everything you can do with time travel has been done before. If you're a fan of the genre and are paying attention you'll likely figure out many of the key plot points and mysteries on pace with the characters in the film, if not slightly faster. But that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter first of all because Johnson executes so well that figuring it out seems more like a prize than a punishment as you get to see yourself proved right in such a clever way. And it doesn't matter most of all because Looper cares more about characters than it does about gimmicks.
What time travel gives Johnson here is not a logical puzzle box to unravel but the chance to have a young man face his older self and learn from his own mistakes. It gives Johnson the chance to have old-Joe deride young-Joe for thinking and behaving like a child and have young-Joe realize that not only is this correct but also that his older self hasn't progressed beyond that stage, either, and choose a different path. It allows Johnson to completely reframe the heroes journey in a way that we've never quite seen before.
Fans of science fiction will be quick to tell you that we're currently experiencing a revival of the genre with a crew of young, intelligent storytellers using science fiction to tackle big ideas again rather than just banging and crashing. In that context Duncan Jones is frequently held up as the gold standard. Well, as good as Moon and Source Code both are, Looper exceeds both quite handily. Moon and Source Code are both good, even very good films. Looper is a great one. You can, perhaps, argue that it is slightly longer than it needs to be but that's quibbling, really. It is a film that deserves comparison to the likes of Twelve Monkeys - which it is arguably better than - and perhaps even Blade Runner, though the style is worlds different. It is clearly a great film right out of the gate. Five or ten years from now we may very well be looking back on it as a classic.
In this world young Joe Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) not only survives but prospers by working as a looper.
The concept works like this. Thirty years farther into the future time travel has been created but judged so dangerous that it has been outlawed. And so it is gone from the legal market but very much present in the criminal underworld. When a future criminal needs to make someone disappear they do so literally. They load them into a time machine - hooded and bound and with silver bars strapped to their back - to a set place and time where a looper awaits them with a gun. Person appears, looper fires then collects the silver and disposes of the body. Neat. Clean. No murder in the future, dead guy never officially existed in the past. It's the perfect crime.
But for Joe and others like him this lifestyle comes at a cost. At some point - they never know when - their future bosses will decide their services are no longer required. And when that happens it is time to close the loop. The looper's future self is found and sent back to be killed, the young looper none the wiser until they see that their customary payment has been delivered in gold rather than silver. Their old self dead, the young self is released from their contract and sent off to live a comfortable life for the next thirty years on the profits from their gold. Should they decline or fail to kill themselves? Well, that's an option best not entertained.
And yet that is what happens to Joe. He arrives at the designated time and space only to find that his appointment is late, eventually arriving while Joe is checking his watch. Arriving without his hands bound. Without his hood in place. Leaving Joe standing eye to eye with his future self (Bruce Willis). And the moment of hesitation as this registers is all that future-Joe needs to act, to overpower young-Joe and flee into the city. Meaning young-Joe has failed to close the loop. Meaning young-Joe is now on the run for his own life, scrambling to understand what went wrong in the first place so that he can track himself down, kill his older self and hopefully get the life he knew and was comfortable in back.
Writer-director Rian Johnson has accomplished something truly remarkable with his third feature film, Looper. He has delivered a thrilling, entertaining, action packed scifi thriller that is also incredibly smart and he has made it look easy. Looper is an exercise in world building par excellence, a film that is completely engrossing and rewarding on its own terms.
There are many keys to the success of Looper but the primary element is acknowledged directly in Johnson's script with both Joes seated opposite one another in a remote diner. Gordon-Levitt's young-Joe immediately peppers Willis' old-Joe with questions. What is the experience like for you? Do you know what I'm going to do? How does your memory work? Good questions, all, but questions which the elder Joe dismisses with a brusque, "I don't want to talk about time travel shit. We'll just end up drawing diagrams with straws." It seems like little more than a throwaway joke but it reveals something very central to Johnson's priorities here. It's very clear that someone spent a great deal of time having those time travel conversations and drawing those diagrams while Looper was being developed. Great pains have been taken to make sure that the core concepts are clear and neat and follow their own logic. But after having done so Johnson has remembered what so many others forget: The time travel gimmick is ultimately a gimmick. It's setting. It's not what the film is really about. And so, having established the rules he then pushes all of the ins and outs into the background to get at what's really important, and that's the characters.
Johnson is very clearly a character driven writer and an actor's director and every single role here is put on the page in beautiful detail and then delivered to perfection by a uniformly stellar cast. Willis and Gordon-Levitt are absolutely remarkable in the leads, the audience never doubting for a second that these two actors are actually the same man. Likewise Emily Blunt - whose character I am deliberately choosing not to talk about - delivers a powerful, nuanced, conflicted performance. Even when you step away from the leads the cast impresses. Paul Dano, Jeff Bridges, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo and the great Garrett Dillahunt - in my mind one of the greatest and most consistently overlooked character actors in the world today - all deliver stellar renditions of wonderfully complex and realistic characters.
Johnson also proves himself remarkably adept at handling action, the film maintaining a strong sense of pace from start to finish with a number of complex set pieces sure to get the adrenaline flowing. While the goal is very clearly to keep the action as grounded and realistic as possible Looper also makes very good use of special effects when required with a number of scenes executed so well they are sure to draw gasps from the audience.
Looper does not succeed because of its innovation. Yes, it has a clever central concept but let's be honest: It's a time travel movie and virtually everything you can do with time travel has been done before. If you're a fan of the genre and are paying attention you'll likely figure out many of the key plot points and mysteries on pace with the characters in the film, if not slightly faster. But that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter first of all because Johnson executes so well that figuring it out seems more like a prize than a punishment as you get to see yourself proved right in such a clever way. And it doesn't matter most of all because Looper cares more about characters than it does about gimmicks.
What time travel gives Johnson here is not a logical puzzle box to unravel but the chance to have a young man face his older self and learn from his own mistakes. It gives Johnson the chance to have old-Joe deride young-Joe for thinking and behaving like a child and have young-Joe realize that not only is this correct but also that his older self hasn't progressed beyond that stage, either, and choose a different path. It allows Johnson to completely reframe the heroes journey in a way that we've never quite seen before.
Fans of science fiction will be quick to tell you that we're currently experiencing a revival of the genre with a crew of young, intelligent storytellers using science fiction to tackle big ideas again rather than just banging and crashing. In that context Duncan Jones is frequently held up as the gold standard. Well, as good as Moon and Source Code both are, Looper exceeds both quite handily. Moon and Source Code are both good, even very good films. Looper is a great one. You can, perhaps, argue that it is slightly longer than it needs to be but that's quibbling, really. It is a film that deserves comparison to the likes of Twelve Monkeys - which it is arguably better than - and perhaps even Blade Runner, though the style is worlds different. It is clearly a great film right out of the gate. Five or ten years from now we may very well be looking back on it as a classic.
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