Imagine flowing through life, day after day inching ever closer to the inevitable—your own death. Sounds familiar right? Well, what if the degree of which was a bit closer than an estimated lifespan and more like a downright certainty. Add some sci-fi, time travel, supernormal telekinetic elements, and enter … Looper.
If you haven’t heard the name Rian Johnson before, then the name will certainly stick from this day forward. Johnson returns as director for his third and highest-profile film. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a hired gun who takes out people sent from the future to the past to erase them from history—a looper.
Loopers are paid well and enjoy life. However, the catch is that one day somewhere down the line, their future selves are sent back and they “close the loop” by killing their elder versions.
The balance of time in between is left for them to enjoy their golden-parachute retirement—see the parallel?
Sounds like an exceptionally interesting and in-depth sci-fi film. But these elements are readily known and understood in the first 5 minutes.
Yes, it gets deeper and more interesting!
As with most sci-fi films, Looper becomes a parallel of life itself.
The critically acclaimed Blade Runner focused on the nature of questioning our own consciousness—the “Am I a replicant?” paradigm. This became the foundation of mainstream philosophical questions in most sci-fi films over the last 20 to 30 years.
Some allusions to Blade Runner and the most recent “Runner” of our time, Matrix, can be made. However, if the former was more sci-fi drama, and the latter more sci-fi action, then Looper is certainly more dramatic and more action-oriented.
Director Johnson drives the audience on an emotional and psychological journey through the vehicle of the four central characters: Joe (Gordon-Levitt) the looper, Joe’s elder self (Bruce Willis), Sara (Emily Blunt), Levitt’s present day love interest, and her son Cid (Pierce Gagnon).
The future/elder version of Joe, played by Willis, is left to possibly see the demise of the life he created and lived, and fights to ensure its existence in time.
