Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012)

[flyonthewall2983]

Teaser premieres in 3 days

[warren oates]

I read an early draft of the script and was disappointed. Especially since I enjoyed Brick and heard that Johnson was friends with Shane Carruth (Primer) who had even done some story consulting and VFX work on this one. Still I will probably see it in the theater anyway in the hopes that it can become something better than it was on paper which was, dare I say, kind of an Indie

Spoiler

12 Monkeys, complete with Bruce Willis, no less.

[beamish13]

Really looking forward to this. BRICK gave me goosebumps, and I can't wait to see another team-up with Johnson and Gordon-Levitt.

[Brian C]

I even liked The Brothers Bloom. It didn't completely work, I guess, but it had an extremely charming Rachel Weisz performance and was generally agreeably goofy. For a while it was in rotation on Showtime and the more familiar I got with it, the more I liked it.

[Jeff]

I thought this was pretty great -- the best mainstream entertainment for adults in some time. I don't want to think too much about the time travel stuff, because I'm afraid the whole thing will fall apart into a heap of paradoxes as these things usually do. The universe that Johnson creates really works though, and feels authentic and lived-in. Gordon-Levitt and Willis both give performances that are among their best, and Emily Blunt is great as usual even if she's somewhat wasted in a smaller role.

Johnson infuses the script with the some of the same sharp, hard-boiled dialog he deployed so effectively in Brick, and it really works here since the main character is portrayed as having watched too many 20th century movies and taking on their affectations. The script as also clearly influenced by La jetée (or maybe 12 Monkeys) with touches of

Spoiler

Carrie(!)

, but it feels completely original.

Looper certainly bears a re-watching before it leaves theaters, but already feels like a classic of the genre.

[CSM126]

I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum - I thought this was pretty well crap. The story is just nonsensical and illogical, but I can't really cover it without spoilers, so

Spoiler

1. If Joe cut himself and got shot when young, Old Joe should have already had those scars when he arrived. Same goes for Paul Dano's character: he should have already been dead, or at best, torso boy by the time he arrived from the future. The scars/injuries should not magically appear on the older man all of a sudden without his knowledge - the younger man is his own past self, which means they'd already be there. This is just laziness in time travel writing.

2. If Joe committed suicide as a young man, then that means he never got old, never went back in time, and none of this ever happened. Which means the ending is impossible and stupid.

3. Old Joe should have known every thing that was going to happen. He already lived through all of it as his younger self.

If time travel exists, then logically speaking that means every single point in time exists simultaneous with all others - you can't travel to a destination that no longer exists, or doesn't yet exist. So literally everything that has happened and everything that ever will happen, it's all happening at once. Which means, logically speaking, that the past, present and future cannot be altered, because if they were changed they would change every other moment in time following...but if they all exist already, they're pretty well immutable. So if Old Joe, as a young man, killed his older self and retired, then he too should have been sent back, killed by his younger self, and nothing else. But this movie just throws that all out the window right off the bat and stops making sense altogether. I guess they just thought that magically-appearing scars and vanishing Bruce Willis were just so darn cool to see that they couldn't be bothered to care. Or, as a friend put it "Dude, time travel means anything is possible, so it doesn't have to make sense to be good".

[Jeff]

I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum - I thought this was pretty well crap. The story is just nonsensical and illogical, but I can't really cover it without spoilers, so...

The whole idea of using the time travel conceit here is about how the choices we make determine our future. There are alternate versions of Joe's life dependent upon the choices he makes. Is there any film using time travel that would really seem plausible or devoid of paradoxes? Johnson isn't remotely interested in trying to create a problem-free concept of time travel, since such a thing could never exist. It's simply a narrative device. Johnson winks at this several times in the script (Abe saying, "This time travel stuff will fry your brain," and Old Joe telling Young Joe that if they "talk about this time travel shit, [they'll] be here all day drawing diagrams with straws." For him (and for me), it's largely irrelevant.

[Finch]

With Jeff on this one. I thought it was excellent and agree with the cast who went on record that the film was the best picture they made yet in their respective careers. Looper had far greater resonance with me than any of Nolan's self-important, bloated and overrated Batman films or The Avengers.

[oldsheperd]

I agree with Jeff as well. The first two Terminator films and the Back to the Future Trilogy are well liked by many but full of problems. I think Johnson came up with a successful new spin on the film. Old Joe and Young Joe's conversation is pretty much Johnson telling the audience, "Don't worry about the paradoxes, time travel isn't what this film is about."
I did however have to explain some things to my Dad after the movie. He still thinks it's a sub par film.

Did anyone else get the feeling that Johnson purposefully chose to add a real silly tone to:

Spoiler

The scene where Old Joe shoots up the club like an action hero. My Dad, who is an avid gun collector said the thing with him shooting two PS-90s was pretty silly.

[Jeff]

Did anyone else get the feeling that Johnson purposefully chose to add a real silly tone to:

Spoiler

The scene where Old Joe shoots up the club like an action hero. My Dad, who is an avid gun collector said the thing with him shooting two PS-90s was pretty silly.

Yes. It felt like there was an implied

Spoiler

"Yipee ki-yay, Motherfucker"

at the end of the scene.

[bdsweeney]

Did anyone else get the feeling that Johnson purposefully chose to add a real silly tone to:

Spoiler

The scene where Old Joe shoots up the club like an action hero. My Dad, who is an avid gun collector said the thing with him shooting two PS-90s was pretty silly.

Yes. It felt like there was an implied

Spoiler

"Yipee ki-yay, Motherfucker"

at the end of the scene.

Indeed, hence the reason why

Spoiler

you didn't see Jeff Daniels' comeuppance. It was implied that he (old Joe) just had the 'moves' to kill them all.

Overall, enjoyed it a fair bit. I've not seen a lot of the big summer blockbusters. (Only the new Batman film, which I really outwardly dispised.)

While not terribly original in its conceit, it was nevertheless not based on a pre-existing property ... and (considering the current state) I give it props for that.

Good, diverting entertainment.

[mfunk9786]

I've seen this twice already, and like The Brothers Bloom before it (or this year's Prometheus, if we're talking about the genre rather than the filmmaker), I'm not all that convinced that this is a fully baked idea. There are some major league paradoxes at work here, and I would be so much more willing to dismiss them (like I do with something like the Back to the Future franchise) if they were framed by a story that wasn't so gritty explanatory and self referential about the framework of time travel. I love the first half of the film a whole lot - it establishes Looper as a film for thinking adults in a blunt fashion, with brief narration and without navel-gazing over what exactly resulted in the grim future we're presented with. Little touches, like Joe trading his silver for Chinese currency even while just going to a club in the United States, are appreciated. The Paul Dano segment, while a huge leap in logic in and of itself, works very well. The film hits its peak with the much ballyhooed diner scene - it's perfectly laid out, and has a touch of humor to it that really works well. And then the film introduces Emily Blunt's character, and... well, the film becomes dull when it absolutely shouldn't have to become dull. When we see Old Joe, he's moping around peeking through neighborhood windows and hiding in tunnels, and when we see Young Joe, he's having drawn out conversations with Blunt that are far too hammily scored (Nathan Johnson, you're better than that) and acted without a touch of the zip that Rian Johnson's dialogue had in the first act. Imagine if the scene in Terminator 2 during which Sarah, John, and The Terminator stop off to buy weapons in the desert went on for a solid hour. There's not enough here until things start to go off the rails with regards to Blunt's child (the young actor is superb, by the way), but I don't feel like I ever locked into this complete derail. Set design details become problematic, as Blunt's farm is filled with 1990s and '00s appliances and vehicles and toys (aside from her crop duster), and one wonders how a young woman came across all of these things in 2044 without having to pay a heavy nostalgia price for most of them. The farm stuff in general would have been so much more interesting if it looked and operated like a woman in her late 20s owned a farm in 2044. But instead it played out like a woman in her late 40s owned a farm in 1996. We forget entirely that we're in any sort of future, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's questionable makeup stands out like a sore thumb throughout these sequences because of his suddenly unremarkable surroundings.

The ending completely abandons what's laid out in the beginning of the film - we're given very specific bits of logic (like that involving Dano's character) about what can and can't and should and shouldn't happen to the fabric of time - and they're all thrown out the window in order to deliver a huge, sloppy, sappy paradox to end all paradoxes that pulls the rug out of the concept of the entire two hours of events that came before.

Spoiler

If Young Joe shoots himself, he could have never grown old and come back in time, so Blunt's character would have never met him, etc etc etc

Johnson is working at a relatively high level as a filmmaker, so some of these flaws are forgiven by me since the majority of this film is so much better than the kind of studio fare coming out these days. It's so much better than Christoper Nolan's masturbatory canon from the last few years, for example. But it's not perfect. I just can't align myself with the folks who see a Great film here, it's just very good - and very encouraging w/r/t Johnson's career going forward. He's now made one great film in Brick, one bad-to-mediocre one that collapsed in on itself by the end (The Brothers Bloom) and one good one that feels like a springboard towards getting back to the greatness that he broke into the directorial ranks with in the first place. Let's hope he sees fit to massage out the need to fall back on this high a concept for the third time in a row so that the resulting film doesn't teeter on the brink of collapse yet again. He may have narrowly avoided that fate here - but he was closer than he thinks.

[who is bobby dylan]

I liked Looper. I agree with mfunk that the film starts off well, but slows down and becomes dull in the second half. I didn’t have a problem with paradoxes stemming from time travel, but feel like other parts of the movie weren’t well thought out. For example, we're told that in the future it's impossible to kill people and get away with it, hence the need for Loopers, but this makes no sense since:

Spoiler

Joe becomes a hitman! in the future and apparently has no problem getting away with it.

Next, I would assume that a time travel device would be very complicated. Difficult to build, service and maintain even more so because it would have to be done in secret, since they’re illegal, but somehow criminal organizations, not nation states, universities or large corporations, but criminal organizations are able to do this? No technicians, no apparent special power supply, no security, just a couple of guys in a warehouse throw you inside and back in time you go. I wish the filmmakers had put more effort and imagination into creating the future world. It never feels like a real place (see mfunk's comments about the farm above). The mob is afraid to kill people in the 2070's, but one crime lord can easily assemble the muscle to take over an entire city in the 2040's? We also see people being killed in the 2070’s and apparently The Rainmaker kills large numbers of people then, in a reign of terror, but somehow looping is still necessary? This stuff just wasn’t thought through. It is CLEARLY very easy to kill and get away with it even in 2070. Why would the mob even carry guns in 2070, if it were so easy to get caught? I still thought the movie was entertaining and had its moments even with such flaws, but wish they had been avoided.

[mfunk9786]

I don't doubt that Johnson is smart enough to have avoided these issues, either - he probably just got too close to it or didn't have it edited by someone who would've pointed some of these things out. Or at least, that's what I hope the case is. Brick is so incredibly tight that I'd assume that he's not actually out of his element here, but there are definitely things in the film that suggest a writer who's out of his element. But he couldn't have been, right? He's obviously a very sharp and very smart screenwriter.

[warren oates]

I agree with everyone who liked this film and with mfunk and bobby dylan's criticisms too. Looper was much better than the draft I read of it, in part because of the very strong directing. A million little details of the world that get you bogged down in a dense script like this one were handled with speed and grace in the finished film. There's a lot of intelligent visual storytelling. A lot of moments where Johnson invites the audience to do a little work piecing the world together.

On to some of my bigger problems with the story: Not only is disposing of bodies in the future apparently not the special problem that it must to be in order for the film's entire founding conceit of the Loopers to rest on it, but wasn't anyone else bothered by the fact that

Spoiler

Old Joe's wife dies tragically blatantly right in front of and under the guns of the hitmen/henchmen who come for Old Joe... And they don't seem remotely concerned about disappearing her body, do they!?

Furthermore, if you really start to think about it, why do Loopers have to be assassins at all? Assuming for a second that the problem in the future as the film states it is really body disposal only, why not just kill somebody in the future and ship their corpse to the past?

I also think the film copped out big time on this mysterious Rainmaker's origin story/backstory/ current intentions in the future.

Spoiler

Is it really a reign of terror the Rainmaker's behind or just a glorified gang war? Are we talking an angry supervilliain consolidating power in the transnational criminal underworld? Or are we talking a worldwide genocider with unheard of psychic powers. Basically a Hitler who could kill you just by willing it. Like that little kid in the old Twilight Zone episode "It's A Good Life." In which case, the kid being a tiny future Hulk-Hitler, shouldn't everyone including his sometimes terrified of him mom be ready to pull the trigger? The conflict engine of this film writing-wise seemed like it wanted to have it both ways with regard to the kid. It's not merely personal for Old Joe, not strictly about his wife, you see. The kid's so dangerous that we can't take a chance! And yet a few hugs from mom seem to save the day and the world. And Young Joe seems not at all troubled that his sacrificial suicide might be unleashing the third Antichrist.

Too bad, really, because I thought the film had big balls for going as far as it did with the kids and the violence.

Spoiler

I was genuinely shocked when Old Joe went through with child murder once. (And when things later got so bloody with the boy at the farm.) But was annoyed again by the writing when it turned out, too neatly of course, that Old Joe's next stop was Young Joe's regular whore's kid.

Still, a very good film that makes me wish Rian Johnson would take on co-writers, like, say, for instance, his time travel consultant Shane Carruth.

And I'd definitely be curious to hear mfunk elaborate on his problems with the Paul Dano paradoxes.

[who is bobby dylan]

I was bothered by:

Spoiler

Old Joe's wife dies tragically blatantly right in front of and under the guns of the hitmen/henchmen who come for Old Joe... And they don't seem remotely concerned about disappearing her body, do they!?

Furthermore, if you really start to think about it, why do Loopers have to be assassins at all? Assuming for a second that the problem in the future as the film states it is really body disposal only, why not just kill somebody in the future and ship their corpse to the past?

And wondered why they wouldn't have brought her body to the time machine to be sent back with Old Joe.

I understand Warren Oates complaint about why doesn't the mob just kill people in the future and send the bodies back to the past to be disposed of. The whole justification for Loopers is glossed over VERY quickly and then contradicted very often afterwards.

Something else I don't understand though is how

Spoiler

does Sara, a person basically selected at random, know about Loopers? It's a term that should just be used and only have meaning within a small group of the criminal underworld. If ordinary people know about looping and hence need no convincing that time travel is possible and time travel murder is taking place then wouldn't there be some effort by the authorities to put a stop to looping? We don't see any evidence in the film that this is taking place or that authorities even know about it.

Also, if bodies can be tracked, can't they be tracked just as easily whether the person is alive or dead, meaning, if you kidnap someone, why can't the police track the body? Furthermore, why couldn't they still prosecute the mob officials for murder? They should know that people are being kidnapped/disappearing with no trace, which should be hard to do with the tracking technology, it should be obvious that the mob had found someway to dispose of the bodies, it wouldn't matter that the police didn't know how, they could still prosecute them as murder cases or even kidnapping, so the Looping solution wouldn't really solve anything for the mob. Furthermore, given how poor and desperate people are in 2040, why not just higher some of these poor and desperate people to kill people in 2070 and get caught.

I think Johnson came up with a fun idea, but wasn't able to come up with a way for a lot of the details in the story (not even talking about the time travel element) to make sense, i.e. not be immediately contradicted by other things in the story.

[mfunk9786]

In answer to your spoilertagged question, she'd been hanging around the city with a rather vagrant lifestyle for a few years. It's presumably the kind of thing you'd hear whispers about. Plus, the fella who runs the whole operation runs the city, so there isn't really even a need for secrecy (In 2044. 2074 is another story, obviously.)

[who is bobby dylan]

I agree with you. I just wonder why the police and other law enforcement wouldn't hear the same whispers and of course, if the mob can run whole US cities in the future, with little need to hide the fact that they possess time traveling abilities, why/how did things change so much in 30 years that in the future they have to keep it a secret. Anyway, I basically agree with your original post that Looper is closer to just missing being a failure/collapse, than just missing being a masterpiece.

[mfunk9786]

I'd still say it's like, a 3.5 star out of 5 film, and one I'd recommend to people. I was just expecting so much more.

[warren oates]

Also, if bodies can be tracked, can't they be tracked just as easily whether the person is alive or dead, meaning, if you kidnap someone, why can't the police track the body? Furthermore, why couldn't they still prosecute the mob officials for murder? They should know that people are being kidnapped/disappearing with no trace, which should be hard to do with the tracking technology, it should be obvious that the mob had found someway to dispose of the bodies, it wouldn't matter that the police didn't know how, they could still prosecute them as murder cases or even kidnapping, so the Looping solution wouldn't really solve anything for the mob.

This is a good point that you're raising. If there's enough other evidence, it's unusual but not unprecedented to successfully prosecute murderers without a victim's body even today.

[who is bobby dylan]

I agree with mfunk. Despite all the flaws noted above I still enjoyed the movie and was able to get lost in it during the first half and then again at the end. If anyone has even a slight interest in it, I would recommend seeing it. It's not easy to imagine what the future will be like, let alone to make one that feels fully realized both as its own world and as an extension of our present, especially in limited time and on a budget, so I don't fault Johnson strongly for failing to do something that's impossible to do (even experts don't make long term future predictions with any greater accuracy than random people do). Like mfunk, I was more disappointed by what I expected and not getting more than what the movie chooses to focus on, which is the idea of our choices creating the future. In this sense the movie is a little weird because both the future Rainmaker and Old Joe are products of the choices that young Joe makes, Old Joe even gets upset at Young Joe because of this. So ultimately the movie finally comes down to

Spoiler

one character having to make a choice, that not only defines who he is, but who he and others will or wont become.

I think that moment is worth the mistakes in the movie, but I was still left wanting, perhaps undeservedly so, more.

[warren oates]

I agree with mfunk. Despite all the flaws noted above I still enjoyed the movie and was able to get lost in it during the first half and then again at the end. If anyone has even a slight interest in it, I would recommend seeing it. It's not easy to imagine what the future will be like, let alone to make one that feels fully realized both as its own world and as an extension of our present, especially in limited time and on a budget, so I don't fault Johnson strongly for failing to do something that's impossible to do (even experts don't make long term future predictions with any greater accuracy than random people do). Like mfunk, I was more disappointed by what I expected and not getting more than what the movie chooses to focus on, which is the idea of our choices creating the future. In this sense the movie is a little weird because both the future Rainmaker and Old Joe are products of the choices that young Joe makes, Old Joe even gets upset at Young Joe because of this. So ultimately the movie finally comes down to

Spoiler

one character having to make a choice, that not only defines who he is, but who he and others will or wont become.

I think that moment is worth the mistakes in the movie, but I was still left wanting, perhaps undeservedly so, more.

And like Walter Murch is apt to say, the emotional logic of this ending trumps all other modes of logical concern and coherency (narrative, time travel, etc.). And if it's working that will matter more to the audience than anything else. I saw it with a full house that seemed quite gripped and satisfied enough by the ending to burst into applause.

The film is worth seeing for sure. But I think you're slightly overstating the degree of achievement vis-a-vis the budget. Immediately after seeing the film I said to my friends that I would like it even better if it had been made for $20 million or less. But $30 million was the budget ballpark and that's District 9 territory. Not that both films weren't smartly designed, with lots of bang for their production value dollars, just that the achievement isn't unique or mind-blowing given the resources available.

[mfunk9786]

I'd argue that considering their budgets, District 9 accomplished a much more impressive end product. Looper actually looks a bit more like it was made for sub-$10 million, if we're talking turkey here. There's so much more creativity that could have gone into the production design (and I'm not just talking about making the future more 'slick,' either. There just wasn't a sense of where we were most of the time, in terms of chronology) that the resulting product looked... inexpensive. I'm shocked at the budget you quoted - I assumed this was far less expensive to put together.

[warren oates]

I'd argue that considering their budgets, District 9 accomplished a much more impressive end product. Looper actually looks a bit more like it was made for sub-$10 million, if we're talking turkey here. There's so much more creativity that could have gone into the production design (and I'm not just talking about making the future more 'slick,' either. There just wasn't a sense of where we were most of the time, in terms of chronology) that the resulting product looked... inexpensive. I'm shocked at the budget you quoted - I assumed this was far less expensive to put together.

Fair enough, although the one advantage District 9 has is dirt cheap talent. I doubt that everyone in Looper worked for scale.

[who is bobby dylan]

Haven't seen District 9, so can't comment on it. Didn't mean to suggest that more money would have helped in terms of slickness, was thinking more about time and just generally meant that making a movie, let alone a mainstream one that will play in many theaters is hard and that it's easy to pick out things about them that don't work in hindsight/outside the inner bubble of the filmmakers and that those flaws, in this case don't totally detract from the movie. I agree that the future isn't fully realized, but this may have come from the fact and I'm guessing, that Johnson wasn't interested in a movie about the future, but needed to set his story in it to make it plausible, so not much thought went into fleshing out the background of the future world besides a few details like dialog from Abe, tks, etc.