We saw "Looper" and it was good, but problematic

[drwex]

Looper posits a future world (mostly US/Kansas) that is somewhat decayed and dystopian - heavy Blade Runner influences throughout- but mixed with pragmatic back-to-manual-labor farming. The movie posits that in this future time travel hasn't been invented yet, but it will be invented about 30 years farther into the future. Considered dangerous and outlawed, time travel is used by criminal gangs to get rid of people untraceably. Grab 'em, zap 'em back to the past where hired thugs - loopers - kill their targets and dispose of the bodies. Eventually, the looper has to kill his future self, closing the loop and setting in motion a 30-year clock that counts down the looper's remaining life.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis both turn in good performances as a looper (Joe) and his future self (old Joe). Emily Blunt does a great job as a single mom trying to make a life with the troubled son she abandoned two years previously, both now caught up in Joe's story. I think the movie tackles some difficult and interesting things, and does an admirable job, but is fatally flawed.

Good stuff first: I liked the way the future was portrayed. Things were different, but also the same. Public libraries offer free access to the Net on clear translucent pop-up display screens, but you can still print things out on paper. There are many new cars and motorcycles, but they're the playthings of rich people. The general populace deals with what look like typical cars, often retrofitted with some newish gear like solar panels or a fuel recycling system.

Movies often try to make SF futures look too different when in fact stuff changes much more slowly than we think it does. In Loopers, farmers still pull out stumps by hacking at them with axes or using a chain attached to a plow, but they also have Roomba-like small-scale crop dusters that can be programmed to fly over a field autonomously. It's a very clever mix. Likewise, clothing and hair are subtly different - e.g. there are jackets that close without obvious buttons or zippers, but shoes are still shoes and people still wear neckties (though they may get mocked for being deliberately retro).

As I mentioned, this is really a three-person movie and all three leads turn in good performances. Gordon-Levitt gives his gunslinging junkie character a surprising amount of depth and complexity, Blunt is stellar as a flawed woman trying to do her best in some very scary circumstances, and Willis is good as the older generation.

As an aside, I find Willis is doing a spectacular job of aging into older-generation roles. He's not trying to play down or play younger than he is, but he's still carrying his characters with strength and flair. The last person I can think of who made this young-guy-role to old-guy-role this well is Morgan Freeman and while I wouldn't put Willis into Freeman's class as a pure actor, it's interesting to see how he's making this transition. I think Hollywood is still flailing around badly trying to figure out how to star older actors, and appeal to an aging audience, when it has been so relentlessly youth-focused up to now. It's certainly doing better with male actors than with female.

The movie's ending caught me by surprise. It requires a unique moment of revelation on Joe's part and how he responds to that revelation. I confess I didn't see it coming. Generally the scripting and dialog are like that - good quality, not too predictable.

Also big props to writer-director Rian Johnson for what he chose to leave OFF camera. The movie elides several scenes that could have been much more gory, and skips over its only real sex scene, in ways that seem to work and aren't forced. At one point Old Joe initiates a bloodbath, wiping out most of the loopers and the hired guns/gangsters around them. But it's filmed as Willis in fairly tight frame, shooting at things that are off-camera. Later you see blood and bodies, but the scene could easy have been filmed as much more gore-splash.

So what's wrong with the movie? There are two problems with the plot, one of which is just argh-tastic and the other is this time-travel paradox thing.

The motivating force for Old Joe in the movie is to get back his wife in the future who is accidentally shot and killed during the course of his abduction when his 30-year clock has run out. The first issue with this is - who cares, if you're dead? Whether or not his wife was shot is irrelevant if he allows himself to be killed. So either his motivation is to live, or it's not. The wife is a maguffin, and a bad one. It's bad because, see, the whole purpose of this looper set-up is to kill people in the past because in the future there's all kinds of sophisticated tracking and blah-blah handwave. If that's all such a big deal, then why are the thugs carrying guns in the first place (particularly given that we see they have highly effective non-lethal weapons) and why aren't they concerned about this civilian casualty? If a random dead person matters then they're frelled and if she doesn't matter then there's no reason to go through all the rigamarole of sending people back in time anyway?

Second (and here I am TOTALLY GIVING AWAY THE SURPRISE ENDING): Under ordinary circumstances, the looper kills his future self; even though it's in that future-self's past it's still a linear set of events, no problem. The problem comes along with the plot's major story which is that the older self - Old Joe - escapes and starts doing things to try and change his own timeline. We see that changes to the body of the present-day person are reflected in the body of the future person, but when young Joe shoots himself, Old Joe disappears.

Presumably, this is because with Joe dying when he does, Old Joe never comes to be. The movie makes a big deal out of how the present-day bad guys can't kill off the present-day loopers, presumably to avoid this. But if Old Joe never comes to be then there's nobody to travel back in time and kick off the whole chain of events in the first place. This is sort of the classical "what if you go back in time and kill your grandfather" Gedankenexperiment and it's just whiffed completely by the Loopers script.

Comments

[bluegargantua]

I don't get why they have to kill the older version of themselves in the first place. Random people appear and you kil them. No paradox. There's no reason to send you back to be killed by your younger self. Even if future cops caught future you and made you spill the beans on everyone you ever killed, it's not clear that it ties you to any particular gang leader. With the right blind drops you're just a hired killer and the case ends with you. Not to mention that the police could go back in time a few days, plant a surveilance device and figure out who abducted the target in the future...I'm already thinking about this more than I should.

Also, I'm excited by the prospect of a time-travel device so effective that criminal organizations can build one. Yes, drug gangs have built tanks and subs and stuff, but it's not like they're building aircraft carriers. So that means time-travel is a lot easier than most people would think and it's being wildly abused even as we speak.

later
Tom

[bluegargantua]

Or just time-travel them back to Hiroshima or an active volcano or outer space so no one has to deal. If it's a time machine, it's also a space machine.

Arg! I hate this movie and I haven't even seen it!
Tom

[drwex]

Again, that's something I am willing to roll with. If you want to _know_ that someone is dead and gone you don't zap them back to someplace random where they or their fossilized bones or titanium body implants might later turn up to cause trouble. You want them gone, you make sure it's done right, you do it yourself, or with people you trust to do it.

[drwex]

I think the point of each looper having to kill his own future self is part of the criminal boss demonstrating his absolute power over the looper's life. It's purely a status thing, plus you get the gold payday and you know you're done. But you also know your own future which I suspect discourages a lot of people from even trying to run. Why run if you know you'll be caught?

My suspicion is that the bad guys' time machine is probably stolen. Or maybe military surplus. That sort of thing I can hand-wave away. It's the bigger logic gaps that bother me.

[vibrantabyss.livejournal.com]

Agree on the absolute power thing.

I'd actually bet that the bad guys' time machine was invented by one very creative hyper-telekinetic... which of course makes little sense, because why invent the thing that will cause the bad to happen? But there are enough seeds that I think this is the trajectory the world was on.

Part of the entire plot was that things can in fact change, loop-to-loop, and that huge changes can cause a paradox that could, presumably rip things apart, but by killing himself, Joe ties off the loop, presumably sealing the paradox of from "reality". Possibly including never having time-travel invented...

Compare to an ending where he, say, blows his gun hand off instead of killing himself, which could still lead to a disgruntled Old Joe coming back to try and change things, again. Or maybe that would have just been a better ending... two Joes, protecting and mentoring the kid.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Nit: that's Kansas City, not L.A.

[drwex]

Not that I disagree (and it certainly makes the presence of farms and the nearby trains more plausible) but I didn't pick up on where that was stated. Is it in the movie itself?

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

My recollection is that one character mentions being in Kansas verrrrry briefly in passing, but Rian Johnson has confirmed it in interviews. (Actually just the state not the city, so I suppose it could also be neo-Witchita.)

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

"That's a precise description of an inherently fuzzy reality." That was actually to me a very good piece of handwaving. "We admit that this makes no damned sense. We imply that maybe it all would make sense if you had a degree in temporal mechanics but we don't and neither do you so let's just get on with the story."

I have seen exactly one time-travel movie that was self-consistent, and I had to watch it a second time, pausing it every 30 seconds or so to annotate my timeline notes, to figure out what the hell happened. I found it a good movie
even before working out the logic. The movie was Primer--check it out if you haven't heard of it (it was a small indie film, I think.)

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen it, though still kinda want to. But re the wife, I think a whole lot of people care about who lives and dies when they themselves are dead. In this case, he's around to consider whether or not she is still alive after his death, so your description of the motivation doesn't feel all that problematic to me.

[drwex]

I suppose that's abstractly true. I care about my family surviving. But I think once you see the movie you'll see that Old Joe is focused on "getting her back" - it's a fundamentally self-centered approach.