Film Dumpster takes a trip through the space-time continuum and looks at some mind-bending time travel movies.
Part 1: Looper
Looper has an interesting setup: It asks the question of what would happen if time travel came into being during our lifetimes. Already, this makes it interesting because it seems like, in most time travel fantasies, time travel is mostly just an excuse to get the adventure movie off the ground. Think about it: The Time Machine? Adventure. Timeline? Adventure. The Terminator? Four movies, and only the second one tackles the idea in any substantial way. The Back to the Future series is the same way – two of those movies are adventure movies. Marty McFly’s slow dissolving into nothing in Part I is just a plot device giving lip service to the fact that hey, we went back in time. It’s only Part II, the series black sheep, that goes out of its way to bring any heft to the consequences of screwing up the past.
Looper toys a little bit with the idea of the introduction of time travel. First, it gives us a dystopian Kansas in 2044, 30 years before the invention of time travel. Then it removes a good number of the little nuance questions the idea of time travel tends to introduce by telling us that in 2074, it will be outlawed almost immediately and reduced to use by mafia guys. After that, it brings in a whole new set of questions like, just who do I see if I want to fill out a job application for a looper?
Loopers are a special breed of hitman. In the future, when someone pisses off the Mafia’s bigwhigs, that someone gets sent back in time, where he instantly appears on the side of a country road in Kansas so a nearby hitman can blow his head off. Loopers are those hitmen, and it makes one wonder why the Mafia has to be so elaborate. Certainly the threat of being sent 30 years into the past doesn’t carry quite the same kind of pointed weight as a good, old-fashioned ice pick or pair of cement shoes, and just how much money does the mob have to give up for this whole process, anyway? The ice pick or cement shoes would probably be cheaper. The ice pick AND a pair of cement shoes would probably be cheaper, for that matter. Perhaps time travel hits are a way of making certain the bodies are never, EVER found.
There’s a hook, of course, and this one has more to do with the fact that loopers are responsible for body disposal. If a looper is still alive after 30 years in the business, he receives the honor of going back in time to be killed by his younger self! As the main character in Looper, Joe, puts it, the job doesn’t attract the most forward-thinking people. There’s even a morbid little bit of job lingo for this: Closing the loop. Not closing your own loop is punishable by death. I thought it a little scarier that most loopers seem to be perfectly content with this idea. So what happens when Mr. Future Looper isn’t very fond of the idea of getting whacked by his younger, dumber version? Well, Looper introduces us to Joe, a practitioner of this odd little profession. The inevitable day comes when Joe is forced to close his loop, but old Joe doesn’t make it easy. He apparently had some kind of revelation somewhere along the line, and when his employers came along in the future for his loop closing, he took out his attackers, then stepped into the time machine, and is therefore perfectly equipped to beat up and escape young Joe upon his arrival. Old Joe, it turns out, is a man on a mission to change the future. Where he’s from, there’s a new super Mafia guy called The Rainmaker closing every loop he can get, and that doesn’t sit well with old Joe, so he pulled a Terminator and came back to kill this Mafia guy as a kid.
The first half of Looper goes by really smoothly and gives us more than enough of a grasp of the rules in the Looper universe. It gives us a very dystopian look at Kansas 2044, like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. Actually, the entire first half could have easily fit into the Philip K. Dick universe – Dick wrote a great bulk of his work experimenting with the fabric of reality and the conception of reality. Time travel and alternate dimensions were familiar themes of his work. Lots of movies have done time travel, but writer/director Rian Johnson takes a swipe at one of the supreme questions raised by the idea: What if someone was sent back in time and was forced to ice his younger self?
Eventually, we get our answer, but not before Johnson tries a million times to dodge the question. Old Joe and young Joe don’t spend a lot of time yapping it up about the complexities of one killing the other. In fact, they have very little screen time together. For all the questions and complexity raised during the first half of Looper, Johnson sort of plays out the second half in a much more straightforward manner. The opening narration tells us that a small number of people have evolved telekinetic powers, and the second half of Looper is so straightforward that, in the one scene where telekinesis makes a difference, it was still pretty clearly forced into the movie.
The straight-to-the-finish second half is so standard it feels like a bit of a letdown. The telekinesis which some people evolved only plays a serious role once, and it could easily be argued that it could have been left out of the script altogether. The time travel aspect also takes a backseat right until the last few scenes. A good chunk of it takes place at a farmhouse which, surprise, is coincidentally the location of one of Looper’s major plot points. Now, I’m not trying to complain about it too much because it really is well done, but a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere? Come on. We’ve seen this scene played out so often that its lost all meaning.
That may be the best way to describe Looper altogether: A brilliant, thoughtful mindbender which raises questions about time travel which, when stripped of those elements, is a regular thriller. What this proves is that Rian Johnson knows how to write and direct a truly good movie. Yes, the movie feels like it’s dodging a lot of the questions it raises and yes, the second half plays out in a way that makes it almost disappointing. But there was really no way for the second half to live up to the first half. The first half introduced the world, characters, and rules, and for the second half to be able to topple the first, Johnson would probably have to break the world’s rules or introduce some brand new plot device which cops out everything that happened before. Johnson lays off the accelerator as a writer at some point, and once the high concept is finished introducing itself, he just lets the characters take over and drive Looper to its end.
In spite of everything, Looper is still thoughtful and intense. There’s one scene in a diner where old Joe and young Joe sit down and talk about the consequences of their actions; it’s a heated, intense scene which reminded me of the Al Pacino/Robert De Niro diner scene from the 1995 crime thriller Heat. Looper is done very well – it gets your attention through the tricky philosophical heft of time travel, then gives us riveting characters and action which keeps you absorbed through the entire thing.