Krishna
A very interesting movie. First, I am amazed at the meteoric rise of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s career. From the beginnings in the Third Rock From the Sun, he has gone places and gets amazing roles one after the other, especilly in 2010-12. First, he got Inception role, then Fifty Fifty. He followed it up with Batman – The Dark Knight Rises and then now, with Looper. Good for him.
In Looper, we watch the opening scene, which first makes no sense at all. A man in a very lonely field, with just a cloth spread before him and a gun in hand. He consults an old fashioned watch (interesting, given this is the future, and in real life our current watches will perhaps be old fashioned) and is practicing French. At a specific time, he fires the gun and at the exact moment, a bound man with a bag over his head appears just in the right place to take the bullet and die. Appears out of nowhere, too.
All of it is explained quickly, except the French part, so that you get a clue on what happens. The French bit is explained much later. By now, you perhaps know that it is a time travel story and in the new time travel in the cinema/ TV fashion, we go through some loops of time travel, visiting the same place in many iterations. We are also told, in the fashion of many movies from The Butterfly Effect to many Futurama episodes, that it is possible to transform the past and therefore the future, if you choose to.
But the movie is, at least in my opinion, several levels above the usual time travel fare, and is like Inception in its layered complexity and sophistication. It is indeed a thinking person’s time travel story and has a lot of humour built into it as well, which goes very well with the story.
The search for the mysterious RainMaker reminds one of the Terminator, in the relentless search to find and remove the enemy before he becomes very powerful, but again, it is a very different treatment and ending.
The story revolves around Joe Simmons, who is a Looper. The year is 2034. Time travel has not been invented yet but will be soon. (This is a clever ploy to explain why the characters in the story itself, like Joe, cannot travel to the future or the past but why they can meet people who can do so! I think it is ingenious). But in the future, bodies are not easy to dispose off, so they send people who want to be ‘erased’ back to the past, at a specific place, specific time, so that they can be killed and efficiently disposed off here. They are Loopers. All goes well until one Looper, Seth, recognizes that the person sent back to him is his own future self, and knows that if he kills himself, he has precisely forty years to die! (Now why was he not sent to another Looper? I do not know. This is where you can poke some holes in a story that otherwise remarkably holds together). He was meant to be killed and would have been, since he is bound and his head is hidden, but he sings a song that only he himself could have known in the past and thereby reveals that it is he. When Seth hesitates to kill, in effect, himself, he runs away and he runs to Joe for protection. He is caught regardless and how the future self is made to come to his own killers is interestingly told!
Before he dies, though, he says that there is a new power in the future, an evil man called RainMaker, who is intent on “closing all the Loopers” or in effect, sending all Loopers back to be killed. When Joe realizes that his own Looper is back (the young Looper is Joseph Gordon Levitt and the older one is Bruce Willis), the story takes an interesting turn.
The scenes are spectacular, and some of the scenes are very gripping. The themes are slowly brought in – for example, telekinetic mutation that causes some to be able to float a coin – and tied into the story beautifully.
The kid Cid is remarkable in its cuteness and the stubborn self.
Bruce Willis is credible but looks very old, which was a bit of a shock after seeing him in many movies as a different man.
To tell more would spoil the story and the time travel loops are a bit cinematic but the storytelling, the weaving together of the strands and even the (surprise?) ending are all very good.
For the pure entertainment value, I would give it a 8/10
— Krishna