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Movie Review: Looper
13 years ago
General
Should I rephrase this? Nah, nevermind. It's gonna get misinterpreted anyway.
Well, I wanted something short to stop that long-ass whiny journal from wasting a ton of space on my userpage. I kinda fucked up that 'shorter' part, but anyways, here are my thoughts on Looper.
Before we begin, I'd suggest you see this movie. It has a very unique flavor that's pretty easy to contaminate with a lot of preconceptions. So if you're thinking about seeing it or are at all on the fence, go see it, and then come back here and enjoy talking about it. If you've seen it already, or need more convincing than that, stick around. I'm keeping this part spoiler-free so that everyone can get something out of it.
First off, Looper makes a good first impression by having a very solid and believable vision of the future. I wouldn't call it quite hard sci-fi, but it jibed with my sensibilities a lot better than most. It's fun to look at societies and technologies that are fundamentally and wildly different from the ones we have now, but it's ludicrous to suggest that this is the way the future is actually going to happen. Since most future-focused movies claim to make exactly this suggestion in their exposition, that's the lens I tend to inspect them with.
For all the advancements humanity makes, there are a lot of things that don't change, and in all likelihood won't change in a few decades from now. If you compare today to the past, we still have farms, shops, cars, roads and buildings and such that very much resemble their predecessors. Anyone from 1980 would be able to look at my 2004 model car and say "Well, that's a car." or even my computer and say "Well, that's a computer." So it makes more sense to say that these things will still recognizable 30 years from now. Different, more advanced certainly, but not so drastically different that you have to explain to the audience what they are. Cell phones in the movie are little transparent squares with a glowing interface. Display screens can be folded up to store in your pocket. Billboards are animated with sound, and respond to people near them. None of these are such jarring changes that their presence or mode of operation has to be explained, so it all flows with the story. I rather liked the fact that currency has gone back to blocks of precious metals in the future, that's actually a prediction that the current economy is dangerously close to achieving.
The premise of the movie was quickly and neatly explained by the main character near the beginning. A bit blunt, but it certainly kept the exposition moving along. Sixty years from now, technological advances have made murder nearly impossible to get away with, but they have the benefit of time travel. So anyone needing to commit a murder has but to toss the victim in a time machine and send them back thirty years to a simpler time and have a past assassin off him and complete the then relatively simple process of disposing of the body. Ah, the good old days...
I wasted a great deal of time during the movie thinking of all the things that are wrong with that premise, and I suggest that you avoid doing that by reading my summary and then just going into the movie with an open mind regardless. First, really? That's the only practical use for time travel? I get that this is an organized crime syndicate that we're talking about, but offhand I can think of a dozen more effective ways to monetize time travel. That's probably a bit higher than the national average, but I spend a fair bit more time thinking about such things than most. Regardless, this cabal isn't exclusively murder focused, so if there were easy opportunities to grab more cash you'd think they would take them in a heartbeat.
It's not like there aren't lucrative opportunities to be had. A couple hundred bucks in the hands of the right software programmers working out of their garage and you could own half the country by the time the future rolls around. Stock speculation, peddling miracle cures, selling fancy future designer drugs in a world where they aren't illegal and only you know how to make them, and even Biff's half-baked horseracing scheme are all infinitely more effective uses of the technology. This is such a tremendous waste of potential that I have trouble accepting it. Do these guys use their personal Lear jets to fly to Denny's and have breakfast every morning?
Hell, even if somehow murder becomes the world's only profitable enterprise in the future there are many much more effective ways to kill people and dispose of their bodies with a time machine that have far smaller chances of messy complications than this way. You could send someone back to Siberia three seconds before the Tunguska impact or Hiroshima on the day that is the reason you recognize the name of that city. Even if the time machine can't take you to a different place, setting aside the fact that it absolutely can based on the fact that it hits a fast-moving target (Earth) with 100% accuracy, then you could just send someone back to a time when the Earth was a blazing ball of magma, or was populated by millions of future-stool-pigeon-eating dinosaurs.
How the time travel works specifically is never gone into either. That's always a carrot for sci-fi audiences, but there's hardly the briefest flash of that eye-enhancing ketene-rich goodness . The time machine is literally kept hidden in an old shed for most of the movie, and the rules are never properly explained. It's one-way, and the progressive effects of changes to the past are demonstrated a few times, but beyond that, it's just stuff that happens. And you know what? Both of those things are okay.
Old Joe (Bruce Willis) spells it all out for Young Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) in a quote that bears repeating.
"I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it... don't worry about it."
This effectively resolves the scene with his younger self, and also can be interpreted as a message to the viewer. 'We could spend all day talking about the ins and outs of time travel, but I have a story to tell, and that's not what the story is about.' This applies just as well to the whole premise of the movie. 'Look, the future mob needs people dead and they're using time-assassins to do it. That's freaking cool and you should stop worrying about the practicality of such an exercise and pay attention to the story.' Suspension of disbelief is really important to your enjoyment of the movie, and it appears that the director was very much aware of this. Just the right nudges are given to keep your attention where it needs to be so that you can get the most out of the story. And it is certainly a good story.
The plot is very character-driven. It's something that I like to see and use often in my own writings. It's nice to have a pretty, well-developed world, but something interesting has to be going on in it. The best way to accomplish this is to build the characters first and then construct and populate the world with the locations and devices needed for the characters to play out their story. This leads to the kind of shortcuts that made me wince initially, but I won't deny that it's a great way to tell a story.
To that end, the focus of the movie is very narrow. It just follows a few relatively average people through their lives in the near and far future. Sure there's a fair amount of murder, but nothing very earth-shattering on a large scale ever really happens. That aspect was a refreshing change actually. Sure it builds up tension and excitement when the world is at stake, but sci-fi and fantasy are oversaturated with that as it is. It's becoming formulaic. 'Oh really? The quiet, unassuming farmboy just happens to be named Ziradien McBadass VonCometpunch? I wonder what the gypsy fortune-teller is going to have to say to him?' This is a small story in a larger world, and it feels much more personal for it. The tension comes from that much tighter focus and from the fact that you're close enough to really care about the characters. I like getting really deep and introspective on a small situation sometimes, and really, what's more introspective than a character meeting himself?
Now, I wouldn't be critiquing if I didn't complain about more stuff, and everyone knows that it's not funny to like a movie, it's all about watching someone get all worked up spewing bile about nothing until they give themselves a hate aneurism for your amusement. An easy feat, as this movie is by no means perfect. The thing that hits me pretty hard in hindsight was the bafflingly pointless addition of telekinetic powers. That was a big wrench into the machine of the whole "reasonable future" thing that I liked so much earlier. The abilities have almost no significance and fill a plot niche that could've been easily filled by... well absolutely nothing actually. Everything that they use the psychic powers for... okay, the one plot-relevant thing they use the psychic powers for could've been substituted for ordinary personality characteristics. This would've actually made the story a bit more relatable and would be much less jarring. As it is, it just looks like mass-market pandering in what was otherwise a very smart and original movie. 'What? Oh, the kids are into superhero movies these days? Well throw some of that X-Men crap in there. That ought to trick a few of 'em into watching it.'
The other thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was the near-Kubrick level of attention to detail in attempting to get the Old Joe/Young Joe dynamic to work out. I say 'near-Kubrick' because it's clear that a tremendous and highly obsessive amount of effort was expended, but it didn't actually work the way a Kubrick film would. In order to make the premise seem more plausible, Joseph Gordon Levitt had elaborate makeup that made him look more like Bruce Willis, supposedly. I didn't see it. That is to say, I didn't see the resemblance to Bruce Willis. I absolutely saw the makeup. Throughout the movie, I did notice "Why do Joseph Gordon Levitt's lips look like they were rendered 'Tomb Raider' style with a really low number of polygons? Why does he have awkward Spock eyebrows that look like poorly-designed motorcycle aerofoils mixed with abstract modern art sculptures? Why does his skin tone look like a mix between sun-bleached leather a latte that was forgotten in a hot car for a week? Why does his-EUGH! Why is everything about his face completely wrong‽"
So the net effect of all this painstaking effort was one part completely unnoticeable with one part sickeningly noticeable. Not a positive effect in any way shape or form. It might've worked with another actor, but Joseph Gordon Levitt just recently pulled a Gerard Butler and started being in every movie that came out for an entire season. Dark Knight, Inception, GI Joe, Stop-Loss, and probably a handful of others I can't think of offhand were all fresh in my mind. He's everywhere, so I know his face too well for a drastic makeup job like this to pass without notice. I bet that before I started really thinking about it I was subconsciously wondering what the heck was wrong with his face for the whole movie. Every moment of that confusion and unease was wasted time. I was perfectly ready to accept the fact that Joseph Gordon Levitt grows up into Bruce Willis as a story convention. Is it reasonable? No, but 'rocks in glass houses' time assassin people. You asked me to swallow some pretty bitter medicine in terms of story elements, and now you think that eyebrow-shape is the last straw that will finally collapse my suspension bridge of disbelief? Kudos to anyone that actually followed that devastating 30-metaphor-pileup.
I heard after seeing the film that Joseph Gordon Levitt had watched several Bruce Willis films, studying his style and mannerisms in order to more effectively share a character with him. Good on him for being a dedicated actor. That little touch at least had the decency to pass without notice instead of ruining the experience. He handled the role well, and I bet he could've done even better if he didn't have to yell "Go-go Gadget Face!" every morning when he got on set. Stripping off the face-condom he was wearing in every scene probably would've had the same effect on the movie as Joseph Leonard Gordon-Levitt having a shorter name would've had on this review.
And after all that, they didn't even get it right. My OCD-fu was clearly stronger than that of the makeup artist, and I noticed that Bruce Willis' ear lobes dangle while Joseph Gordon Levitt's are attached. Developing gangling ears over the course of a lifetime is not genetically possible, so apparently he sustained some very precise, perfectly symmetrical earlobe-related injuries in the interim. You know how people say "Well, I wasn't really trying." as a safety net in case they fail horribly at something? That way it wasn't their lack of skill that made them completely screw the pooch, they just weren't trying, because who wants to actually try anyway? Well, Looper's makeup team was clearly trying their asses off, making the fact that all this effort was completely unnecessary, and failed at what it was trying to accomplish, and went the extra mile to also fail at a number of things that it was not trying to accomplish, all the more tragic.
Bastille-prisoner-level acts of obsession like this only work when everything is exactly perfect. In cases like this, you've got to go big or don't go at all, and I would've much preferred that they didn't go at all. There was a montage scene of the intervening 30 years where Little Joe grows up into Big Joe, and it was fantastic! It really tied everything together and had a lot of stunning visuals. The makeup there was actually very convincing and worked well in the context of the story. I knew what was going on, so I actually understood that he was starting to gradually look and act more like Old Joe. This was a great place to showcase all the makeup talent. In a perfect world, all the rubberfaces would be confined there where I had but a fleeting moment to recognize the intent, and no time to waste tearing them apart like an energetic puppy with a new slipper that has a poorly-chosen skin color palette.
****SPOILARRS BEYOND****
This first part is just filler for people with poor self-control that couldn't stop themselves from reflexively reading the first few lines. It seems foolish, but that exact problem happens to be one of my numerous character flaws, so it would be very hypocritical of me not to cater to it. This ending is one of those hot-button ones where the wrong five words will completely ruin the movie forever until the end of time like some sort of magic plot-ruining Adamantium bullet, so I wanted to make sure such details were well defended. So umm... I am the very model of a modern major general I have a very... Kay, I think they're gone now. Good thing too, I hate those guys.
Awright, so one of the biggest holes that I saw was the murder of Old Joe's wife. The whole setup of the movie hinges on how hard it is for the mafia to murder people in the future. Thus, while on their way to murder Old Joe, the mafia also blunders into indiscriminately murdering his wife as well just because she happened to be there. Okay, not only did they set themselves up for a Bruce Willis right-hook face-bashing extravaganza by making sure that the last thing he saw before they tried to kill him was them murdering his wife in their home just because she was an inconvenience that happened to be in front of one of their guns, if you have to suckerpunch spacetime in order to get away with murder, might you want to plan things out a little better to maybe economize on the number of murders a given operation entails?
I find it difficult to believe that this elite group of professional time assassin assassins (People that murder professional time assassins, or regular people that murder professional time assassins, shame that English is glitched like that...) could track down the exact location of someone that has been living off the grid and traveling all around the world for 30 years, but not take the time to... maybe scope out the back porch and see that his wife is out there, and then execute their task in a way that would prevent them from being seen, or maybe have a plan for if she sees them that's a little more sophisticated than "Immediately shoot her in the face while Bruce 'Vengeance Machine' Willis is watching". It's Storm Trooper syndrome, or Boba Fett syndrome if you want to look at the original and not the knock-offs that were predictably just as useless as the original. If I'm supposed to believe that this is a super-sophisticated team of organized criminal masterminds, you have to show them at some point being something other than completely incompetent or the threat has no teeth. I mean really, Bruce Willis went to mafia HQ and Bruce Willis'd a full third of them before he even took a hit or broke a sweat.
The point above where I was trying to say it without saying it was that the kid didn't have to grow up into freaking Magneto to be a threat as The Rainmaker. This could've very easily just gone the John Connor route where he simply possesses the qualities that make him a good leader, and will allow him to gain enough influence in the future to become a threat to the time assassins that are trying to off him while he's still a harmless little kitten. Except he's not a harmless little kitten here. He's a cracked-out horror-movie freak-show that can insta-gib you with his mind. That was enough WTFsauce to overwhelm a lot of the more delectable flavors of this movie.
In the end though, the point where Joe not only closes his own loop, he incinerates it in the fire of Mount Doom, is incredibly satisfying. Thanks to the way time travel works here, it's not a cop-out 'Oh, none of it ever happened' ending, it's a beautiful 'I stopped it from happening' ending. It was the perfect conclusion to this journey. I absolutely loved the way the end monologue so passionately demonstrated how we're all the hero of our own story. And that stays true even if Young Joe is the protagonist and Old Joe is the antagonist and both Joes are kind of the antiheroes of the larger meta-story that went on. Comprehending that last sentence awards additional improbable understanding points to the meta-metaphor bonus above.
The fact that Old Joe created the problem that killed his wife and drove him to murder children in the past to prevent, and that only Young Joe can stop it, was mind-blowing. In that instant, it was as if Young Joe was the only one in the parade of time that could see all of the marchers from above instead of each event in sequence. He could see the cliff that this train was headed for and he had only a second to prevent the tragic chain of events. That moment felt like all the mind-screw of Inception packed into a couple seconds. I haven't felt exhilaration like that in a long time. It was both inspired and inspiring.
***Close Spoilers***
I did it at the beginning and I'll do it at the end. I would highly recommend this movie and if you've seen it I would highly recommend that you recommend this movie. It's a great story with compelling characters that have well developed arcs, it's entertaining and thought-provoking and has a great message that was handled well. Bottom line is, you'll never find a perfect movie, but you can certainly expect to find one whose faults are worth looking past.
Before we begin, I'd suggest you see this movie. It has a very unique flavor that's pretty easy to contaminate with a lot of preconceptions. So if you're thinking about seeing it or are at all on the fence, go see it, and then come back here and enjoy talking about it. If you've seen it already, or need more convincing than that, stick around. I'm keeping this part spoiler-free so that everyone can get something out of it.
First off, Looper makes a good first impression by having a very solid and believable vision of the future. I wouldn't call it quite hard sci-fi, but it jibed with my sensibilities a lot better than most. It's fun to look at societies and technologies that are fundamentally and wildly different from the ones we have now, but it's ludicrous to suggest that this is the way the future is actually going to happen. Since most future-focused movies claim to make exactly this suggestion in their exposition, that's the lens I tend to inspect them with.
For all the advancements humanity makes, there are a lot of things that don't change, and in all likelihood won't change in a few decades from now. If you compare today to the past, we still have farms, shops, cars, roads and buildings and such that very much resemble their predecessors. Anyone from 1980 would be able to look at my 2004 model car and say "Well, that's a car." or even my computer and say "Well, that's a computer." So it makes more sense to say that these things will still recognizable 30 years from now. Different, more advanced certainly, but not so drastically different that you have to explain to the audience what they are. Cell phones in the movie are little transparent squares with a glowing interface. Display screens can be folded up to store in your pocket. Billboards are animated with sound, and respond to people near them. None of these are such jarring changes that their presence or mode of operation has to be explained, so it all flows with the story. I rather liked the fact that currency has gone back to blocks of precious metals in the future, that's actually a prediction that the current economy is dangerously close to achieving.
The premise of the movie was quickly and neatly explained by the main character near the beginning. A bit blunt, but it certainly kept the exposition moving along. Sixty years from now, technological advances have made murder nearly impossible to get away with, but they have the benefit of time travel. So anyone needing to commit a murder has but to toss the victim in a time machine and send them back thirty years to a simpler time and have a past assassin off him and complete the then relatively simple process of disposing of the body. Ah, the good old days...
I wasted a great deal of time during the movie thinking of all the things that are wrong with that premise, and I suggest that you avoid doing that by reading my summary and then just going into the movie with an open mind regardless. First, really? That's the only practical use for time travel? I get that this is an organized crime syndicate that we're talking about, but offhand I can think of a dozen more effective ways to monetize time travel. That's probably a bit higher than the national average, but I spend a fair bit more time thinking about such things than most. Regardless, this cabal isn't exclusively murder focused, so if there were easy opportunities to grab more cash you'd think they would take them in a heartbeat.
It's not like there aren't lucrative opportunities to be had. A couple hundred bucks in the hands of the right software programmers working out of their garage and you could own half the country by the time the future rolls around. Stock speculation, peddling miracle cures, selling fancy future designer drugs in a world where they aren't illegal and only you know how to make them, and even Biff's half-baked horseracing scheme are all infinitely more effective uses of the technology. This is such a tremendous waste of potential that I have trouble accepting it. Do these guys use their personal Lear jets to fly to Denny's and have breakfast every morning?
Hell, even if somehow murder becomes the world's only profitable enterprise in the future there are many much more effective ways to kill people and dispose of their bodies with a time machine that have far smaller chances of messy complications than this way. You could send someone back to Siberia three seconds before the Tunguska impact or Hiroshima on the day that is the reason you recognize the name of that city. Even if the time machine can't take you to a different place, setting aside the fact that it absolutely can based on the fact that it hits a fast-moving target (Earth) with 100% accuracy, then you could just send someone back to a time when the Earth was a blazing ball of magma, or was populated by millions of future-stool-pigeon-eating dinosaurs.
How the time travel works specifically is never gone into either. That's always a carrot for sci-fi audiences, but there's hardly the briefest flash of that eye-enhancing ketene-rich goodness . The time machine is literally kept hidden in an old shed for most of the movie, and the rules are never properly explained. It's one-way, and the progressive effects of changes to the past are demonstrated a few times, but beyond that, it's just stuff that happens. And you know what? Both of those things are okay.
Old Joe (Bruce Willis) spells it all out for Young Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) in a quote that bears repeating.
"I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it... don't worry about it."
This effectively resolves the scene with his younger self, and also can be interpreted as a message to the viewer. 'We could spend all day talking about the ins and outs of time travel, but I have a story to tell, and that's not what the story is about.' This applies just as well to the whole premise of the movie. 'Look, the future mob needs people dead and they're using time-assassins to do it. That's freaking cool and you should stop worrying about the practicality of such an exercise and pay attention to the story.' Suspension of disbelief is really important to your enjoyment of the movie, and it appears that the director was very much aware of this. Just the right nudges are given to keep your attention where it needs to be so that you can get the most out of the story. And it is certainly a good story.
The plot is very character-driven. It's something that I like to see and use often in my own writings. It's nice to have a pretty, well-developed world, but something interesting has to be going on in it. The best way to accomplish this is to build the characters first and then construct and populate the world with the locations and devices needed for the characters to play out their story. This leads to the kind of shortcuts that made me wince initially, but I won't deny that it's a great way to tell a story.
To that end, the focus of the movie is very narrow. It just follows a few relatively average people through their lives in the near and far future. Sure there's a fair amount of murder, but nothing very earth-shattering on a large scale ever really happens. That aspect was a refreshing change actually. Sure it builds up tension and excitement when the world is at stake, but sci-fi and fantasy are oversaturated with that as it is. It's becoming formulaic. 'Oh really? The quiet, unassuming farmboy just happens to be named Ziradien McBadass VonCometpunch? I wonder what the gypsy fortune-teller is going to have to say to him?' This is a small story in a larger world, and it feels much more personal for it. The tension comes from that much tighter focus and from the fact that you're close enough to really care about the characters. I like getting really deep and introspective on a small situation sometimes, and really, what's more introspective than a character meeting himself?
Now, I wouldn't be critiquing if I didn't complain about more stuff, and everyone knows that it's not funny to like a movie, it's all about watching someone get all worked up spewing bile about nothing until they give themselves a hate aneurism for your amusement. An easy feat, as this movie is by no means perfect. The thing that hits me pretty hard in hindsight was the bafflingly pointless addition of telekinetic powers. That was a big wrench into the machine of the whole "reasonable future" thing that I liked so much earlier. The abilities have almost no significance and fill a plot niche that could've been easily filled by... well absolutely nothing actually. Everything that they use the psychic powers for... okay, the one plot-relevant thing they use the psychic powers for could've been substituted for ordinary personality characteristics. This would've actually made the story a bit more relatable and would be much less jarring. As it is, it just looks like mass-market pandering in what was otherwise a very smart and original movie. 'What? Oh, the kids are into superhero movies these days? Well throw some of that X-Men crap in there. That ought to trick a few of 'em into watching it.'
The other thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was the near-Kubrick level of attention to detail in attempting to get the Old Joe/Young Joe dynamic to work out. I say 'near-Kubrick' because it's clear that a tremendous and highly obsessive amount of effort was expended, but it didn't actually work the way a Kubrick film would. In order to make the premise seem more plausible, Joseph Gordon Levitt had elaborate makeup that made him look more like Bruce Willis, supposedly. I didn't see it. That is to say, I didn't see the resemblance to Bruce Willis. I absolutely saw the makeup. Throughout the movie, I did notice "Why do Joseph Gordon Levitt's lips look like they were rendered 'Tomb Raider' style with a really low number of polygons? Why does he have awkward Spock eyebrows that look like poorly-designed motorcycle aerofoils mixed with abstract modern art sculptures? Why does his skin tone look like a mix between sun-bleached leather a latte that was forgotten in a hot car for a week? Why does his-EUGH! Why is everything about his face completely wrong‽"
So the net effect of all this painstaking effort was one part completely unnoticeable with one part sickeningly noticeable. Not a positive effect in any way shape or form. It might've worked with another actor, but Joseph Gordon Levitt just recently pulled a Gerard Butler and started being in every movie that came out for an entire season. Dark Knight, Inception, GI Joe, Stop-Loss, and probably a handful of others I can't think of offhand were all fresh in my mind. He's everywhere, so I know his face too well for a drastic makeup job like this to pass without notice. I bet that before I started really thinking about it I was subconsciously wondering what the heck was wrong with his face for the whole movie. Every moment of that confusion and unease was wasted time. I was perfectly ready to accept the fact that Joseph Gordon Levitt grows up into Bruce Willis as a story convention. Is it reasonable? No, but 'rocks in glass houses' time assassin people. You asked me to swallow some pretty bitter medicine in terms of story elements, and now you think that eyebrow-shape is the last straw that will finally collapse my suspension bridge of disbelief? Kudos to anyone that actually followed that devastating 30-metaphor-pileup.
I heard after seeing the film that Joseph Gordon Levitt had watched several Bruce Willis films, studying his style and mannerisms in order to more effectively share a character with him. Good on him for being a dedicated actor. That little touch at least had the decency to pass without notice instead of ruining the experience. He handled the role well, and I bet he could've done even better if he didn't have to yell "Go-go Gadget Face!" every morning when he got on set. Stripping off the face-condom he was wearing in every scene probably would've had the same effect on the movie as Joseph Leonard Gordon-Levitt having a shorter name would've had on this review.
And after all that, they didn't even get it right. My OCD-fu was clearly stronger than that of the makeup artist, and I noticed that Bruce Willis' ear lobes dangle while Joseph Gordon Levitt's are attached. Developing gangling ears over the course of a lifetime is not genetically possible, so apparently he sustained some very precise, perfectly symmetrical earlobe-related injuries in the interim. You know how people say "Well, I wasn't really trying." as a safety net in case they fail horribly at something? That way it wasn't their lack of skill that made them completely screw the pooch, they just weren't trying, because who wants to actually try anyway? Well, Looper's makeup team was clearly trying their asses off, making the fact that all this effort was completely unnecessary, and failed at what it was trying to accomplish, and went the extra mile to also fail at a number of things that it was not trying to accomplish, all the more tragic.
Bastille-prisoner-level acts of obsession like this only work when everything is exactly perfect. In cases like this, you've got to go big or don't go at all, and I would've much preferred that they didn't go at all. There was a montage scene of the intervening 30 years where Little Joe grows up into Big Joe, and it was fantastic! It really tied everything together and had a lot of stunning visuals. The makeup there was actually very convincing and worked well in the context of the story. I knew what was going on, so I actually understood that he was starting to gradually look and act more like Old Joe. This was a great place to showcase all the makeup talent. In a perfect world, all the rubberfaces would be confined there where I had but a fleeting moment to recognize the intent, and no time to waste tearing them apart like an energetic puppy with a new slipper that has a poorly-chosen skin color palette.
****SPOILARRS BEYOND****
This first part is just filler for people with poor self-control that couldn't stop themselves from reflexively reading the first few lines. It seems foolish, but that exact problem happens to be one of my numerous character flaws, so it would be very hypocritical of me not to cater to it. This ending is one of those hot-button ones where the wrong five words will completely ruin the movie forever until the end of time like some sort of magic plot-ruining Adamantium bullet, so I wanted to make sure such details were well defended. So umm... I am the very model of a modern major general I have a very... Kay, I think they're gone now. Good thing too, I hate those guys.
Awright, so one of the biggest holes that I saw was the murder of Old Joe's wife. The whole setup of the movie hinges on how hard it is for the mafia to murder people in the future. Thus, while on their way to murder Old Joe, the mafia also blunders into indiscriminately murdering his wife as well just because she happened to be there. Okay, not only did they set themselves up for a Bruce Willis right-hook face-bashing extravaganza by making sure that the last thing he saw before they tried to kill him was them murdering his wife in their home just because she was an inconvenience that happened to be in front of one of their guns, if you have to suckerpunch spacetime in order to get away with murder, might you want to plan things out a little better to maybe economize on the number of murders a given operation entails?
I find it difficult to believe that this elite group of professional time assassin assassins (People that murder professional time assassins, or regular people that murder professional time assassins, shame that English is glitched like that...) could track down the exact location of someone that has been living off the grid and traveling all around the world for 30 years, but not take the time to... maybe scope out the back porch and see that his wife is out there, and then execute their task in a way that would prevent them from being seen, or maybe have a plan for if she sees them that's a little more sophisticated than "Immediately shoot her in the face while Bruce 'Vengeance Machine' Willis is watching". It's Storm Trooper syndrome, or Boba Fett syndrome if you want to look at the original and not the knock-offs that were predictably just as useless as the original. If I'm supposed to believe that this is a super-sophisticated team of organized criminal masterminds, you have to show them at some point being something other than completely incompetent or the threat has no teeth. I mean really, Bruce Willis went to mafia HQ and Bruce Willis'd a full third of them before he even took a hit or broke a sweat.
The point above where I was trying to say it without saying it was that the kid didn't have to grow up into freaking Magneto to be a threat as The Rainmaker. This could've very easily just gone the John Connor route where he simply possesses the qualities that make him a good leader, and will allow him to gain enough influence in the future to become a threat to the time assassins that are trying to off him while he's still a harmless little kitten. Except he's not a harmless little kitten here. He's a cracked-out horror-movie freak-show that can insta-gib you with his mind. That was enough WTFsauce to overwhelm a lot of the more delectable flavors of this movie.
In the end though, the point where Joe not only closes his own loop, he incinerates it in the fire of Mount Doom, is incredibly satisfying. Thanks to the way time travel works here, it's not a cop-out 'Oh, none of it ever happened' ending, it's a beautiful 'I stopped it from happening' ending. It was the perfect conclusion to this journey. I absolutely loved the way the end monologue so passionately demonstrated how we're all the hero of our own story. And that stays true even if Young Joe is the protagonist and Old Joe is the antagonist and both Joes are kind of the antiheroes of the larger meta-story that went on. Comprehending that last sentence awards additional improbable understanding points to the meta-metaphor bonus above.
The fact that Old Joe created the problem that killed his wife and drove him to murder children in the past to prevent, and that only Young Joe can stop it, was mind-blowing. In that instant, it was as if Young Joe was the only one in the parade of time that could see all of the marchers from above instead of each event in sequence. He could see the cliff that this train was headed for and he had only a second to prevent the tragic chain of events. That moment felt like all the mind-screw of Inception packed into a couple seconds. I haven't felt exhilaration like that in a long time. It was both inspired and inspiring.
***Close Spoilers***
I did it at the beginning and I'll do it at the end. I would highly recommend this movie and if you've seen it I would highly recommend that you recommend this movie. It's a great story with compelling characters that have well developed arcs, it's entertaining and thought-provoking and has a great message that was handled well. Bottom line is, you'll never find a perfect movie, but you can certainly expect to find one whose faults are worth looking past.
--
"I rather liked the fact that currency has gone back to blocks of precious metals in the future, that's actually a prediction that the current economy is dangerously close to achieving."
Are you sure that was all currency, or just how loopers got paid? I mean, their money had to travel in time and you wouldn't want wrong-dated cash, etc.
"I wasted a great deal of time during the movie thinking of all the things that are wrong with that premise, and I suggest that you avoid doing that by reading my summary and then just going into the movie with an open mind regardless. First, really? That's the only practical use for time travel? I get that this is an organized crime syndicate that we're talking about, but offhand I can think of a dozen more effective ways to monetize time travel. That's probably a bit higher than the national average, but I spend a fair bit more time thinking about such things than most. Regardless, this cabal isn't exclusively murder focused, so if there were easy opportunities to grab more cash you'd think they would take them in a heartbeat."
This is the same sort of argument that could ruin _every_ movie. That is, you can say something like "Man, if only that Bond villain had just shot 007 as soon as he saw him, instead of talking to him and putting him in this death trap...." and while you're right, that means that the hero would be dead and the movie would be over an hour too early. It's not the story they're telling, in essence. In any case, I just want to say that you don't mention how the premise also includes that time travel is strictly forbidden in the future where it exists in your review before talking about it like that. So, maybe you should? Also, there could be other arms of the crime cabal that are off doing sneaky time travelly things.. but maybe if you try to change the past to make your present more wealth-related, it merely creates a new timeline that you, who have remained in the future to reap the benefits, will not experience, due to divergent paths of time. Note the film's sequence of us seeing Joe closing his Loop and then changing this outcome when he himself becomes the end of the loop.
(I see now, though, that you resolved this issue by ending your own debate, bringing up the line in the movie about diagrams with toothpicks and straws and not talking about time travel. So thank you.. but just as you could have avoided the topic and removed that segment of your thoughts, I am also not going to go back and remove what I thought/said in my previous paragraph.)
About the make-up: I noticed that JGL looked different, but didn't think he looked unnatural.
"Joseph Gordon Levitt just recently pulled a Gerard Butler and started being in every movie that came out for an entire season. Dark Knight, Inception, GI Joe, Stop-Loss, and probably a handful of others I can't think of offhand were all fresh in my mind." You forgot Premium Rush.. and Inception was two years ago, man. Stop-Loss is from 4 years ago. Maybe you should have mentioned 50/50 or his other Zero and Five picture: 500 Days of Summer? :P He's also going to be in 'Lincoln', so.. there's that too. I'm not saying you're wrong, it's just that you could have picked better examples. I like JGL, though, but he IS being over exposed. I think more effort maybe could have been made to make Bruce look like Joseph. But no, the young guy had to act like Bruce and put on make up. Couldn't they BOTH wear some?
You make a good point, though, and I agree: There doesn't need to be any make-up, just acting. I'm willing to just believe one becomes the other. The only time they needed make-up would have been the transitional 30-year montage where one grows into the other. Still, it's better than getting one actor to play both parts and having it be a young guy wearing 'old man makeup'.. and also have the movie do some doubling effect so that the actor appears in the shot twice, meaning he would have been filming without someone to act off of, or at least acting off of some random stand-in, which would also make things awkward, in that the reactions would askew, since it couldn't have been his own acting.
So, yeah, it's better that they got two guys!
Oh, I didn't notice the eyebrows thing. Hrmm, seems like Bruce would have been the one to get that makeup added on, as it would have been easier to have the lobes anchored than to add dangling bits onto Joseph's. So, yeah, my theory about Bruce being an old jerk who didn't want any make-up because he's a stick in the mud and couldn't be bothered or some other primadonna reason seems true.
Yeah, it seems you then mention how you'd have liked it if it all stayed in the montage. I was right!
You referred to them as Little Joe and Big Joe, and that's something I have my own neurosis about: I imagine Bruce Willis as a BIG GUY [I guess it's his stage presence or his action-hero pedigree in my head] and I think of JGL as a shorter slimmer guy [probably because I just saw Premium Rush a few days/weeks before Looper]. But it's not like the character is going to grow any taller, so I suppose I could have perceived there being this level of disconnect with the notions I had of their disparate body-types.. but I didn't really care/notice.
The telekinesis was introduced early enough and Sarah's use of it foreshadowed greater potential, as did the opening narration.. to a point where I didn't balk at the eventual reveal of the super version of it. The hints about the Rainmaker fit in as clues to someone with powers, so I think it fits. The fact that telekinesis is in the movie at all was a curveball for me, though. I thought it was just a time travel story, but I eventually accepted that it was less time travel and more a sci-fi-ish adventure, more about a man versus himself, in an odd way. Still, maybe it would be better without the TK stuff. We'll never know. I mean, WITH the TK in the picture, we have this neat subplot about Cid being dangerous as he is and not just some kid you have to protect. I mean, if they retained the element of Bruce killing children to off the Rainmaker early in his life, and there were no powers, then.. well, the climax wouldn't have has as much punch, as you wouldn't have the threat of Cid hanging over things.
Your talk about Old Joe's wife smacks of that same old movie ruiner logic I mentioned before (about just shooting Bond dead). She died because it was for the story. If he didn't have a reason to rage, he'd have just let them close his loop.
"to grow up into freaking Magneto to be a threat as The Rainmaker" -- I think you mean 'freaking Phoenix from X-Men 3', what with the TK disintegration kills.
"This could've very easily just gone the John Connor route where he simply possesses the qualities that make him a good leader, and will allow him to gain enough influence in the future to become a threat to the time assassins that are trying to off him while he's still a harmless little kitten."
Whoa, wait. That line makes it sound like you're saying/you think that the 'time assassins' are trying to kill Cid. They're not. Cid becomes the big crime boss that's responsible for closing all the loops, after all. Which is another interesting point you seem to have not really taken into consideration. The Rainmaker is/was trying to stop all the killing and violence by taking over the organization and basically shutting it all down, in a way. I know this speaks to things I can't really know, but I thought, given that we learn that Cid becomes the RM, he's trying to put a stop to the shit that caused his life to be ruined in the first place, which made the whole thing oddly sympathetic to me. I mean, it's basically a good thing that he's closing all the loops, honestly.
Also, they kinda did do a little 'John Connor'ish stuff in showing how smart Cid was, both with his technical skills in re-jiggering his toys and with that one mind-game scene with his mother. He seemed really mature for his age, too.
I agree about the ending, of course. :}
Did you ever see 12 Monkeys? Methinks Bruce Willis loves stories with insane cyclical time loopy shit in them.
"Are you sure that was all currency, or just how loopers got paid? I mean, their money had to travel in time and you wouldn't want wrong-dated cash, etc."
Point for you. I remember Young Joe turning much of his silver into paper money before taking off on his world murderin' tour. The thought still amuses me though.
"This is the same sort of argument that could ruin _every_ movie... (I see now, though, that you resolved this issue by ending your own debate, bringing up the line in the movie about diagrams with toothpicks and straws and not talking about time travel. So thank you.. but just as you could have avoided the topic and removed that segment of your thoughts, I am also not going to go back and remove what I thought/said in my previous paragraph.)"
I was making a point there. The fact that the good cancels out the bad is very important. I might've gotten a bit spun-up about the premise, but the fact that the movie could make me like such an apparently flawed story is most certainly worth mentioning.
"You forgot Premium Rush.. and Inception was two years ago, man. Stop-Loss is from 4 years ago."
Yes, if I had Googled him I could've come up with a lot more recent JGL movies, but that wasn't the point. I was saying that at a moment's notice I could pull five recent JGL movies that I've actually seen out of the air. I knew there were more, and your examples prove that. I've seen a lot of him, so when you change his face my subconscious is going to be screaming 'Something is wrong!' instead of paying attention to the movie.
"You make a good point, though, and I agree: There doesn't need to be any make-up, just acting. I'm willing to just believe one becomes the other... So, yeah, it's better that they got two guys!"
Absolutely. A big part of the story is how different Old Joe is from Young Joe, and having contrasting actors to play the two was a brilliant way to illustrate that. Plus, the two have some pretty fast-paced and physical scenes together (Giggity) and trying to movie-magic those together with just one actor wrestling with himself would've been a pain.
"So, yeah, my theory about Bruce being an old jerk who didn't want any make-up because he's a stick in the mud and couldn't be bothered or some other primadonna reason seems true."
Certainly looks that way. This was a breakout role for JGL, but Bruce Willis was just there being Bruce Willis doing what Bruce Willis does in Bruce Willis movies. I will say that beyond refusing to change his face, Bruce Willis seemed to be pretty dedicated to this film. His performance was sincere and believable. Not formulaic and phoned in like his recent works in Die Hard XVII: Die even more harderest.
"You referred to them as Little Joe and Big Joe, and that's something I have my own neurosis about."
Never really thought anything of that. I mean, if you see them on screen together it's pretty obvious who 'Big Joe' is, and the little one grows up into the big one, or at the very least works out a lot. It made enough sense to me to say it without thinking.
"The telekinesis was introduced early enough and Sarah's use of it foreshadowed greater potential, as did the opening narration..."
Yeah it worked I guess, but I still came away from it with the feeling that it could've been done better.
"Your talk about Old Joe's wife smacks of that same old movie ruiner logic I mentioned before (about just shooting Bond dead). She died because it was for the story. If he didn't have a reason to rage, he'd have just let them close his loop."
I realize the purpose her death served in the story. I'm saying that it was one of a litany of examples of the future mafia sucking at their job. She startled them and one of the goons fired without thinking. It happens. But the 'Gatts' really didn't have any other scenes that made them look very effective other than gruesomely torturing Joe's similarly toothless friend. 'Hey look! We stomped on this kitten! We're the best assassins ever!'
"I think you mean 'freaking Phoenix from X-Men 3', what with the TK disintegration kills."
True. Magneto wasn't really about splatterin' people the way Phoenix was.
"Whoa, wait. That line makes it sound like you're saying/you think that the 'time assassins' are trying to kill Cid."
There is a time assassin trying to kill Cid. BRUCE WILLIS. He came from the future and now he's trying to murder the child that will ruin that future for him. How much more 'time assassin' can you get?
"The Rainmaker is/was trying to stop all the killing and violence by taking over the organization and basically shutting it all down, in a way... I mean, it's basically a good thing that he's closing all the loops, honestly."
Yeah. The Rainmaker was at least subjectively good. When all the main characters are professional murderers, it's easy to forget that what they're doing is, you know... wrong. But the wild, fanatic disintergratin', Bruce Willis' wife killin' future is a bad one that Bruce Willis created himself by killing Cid's mom. Presumably there's a mom-included future for him that has him solving the problem of loopers without quite so much genocide.
"Also, they kinda did do a little 'John Connor'ish stuff in showing how smart Cid was, both with his technical skills in re-jiggering his toys and with that one mind-game scene with his mother. He seemed really mature for his age, too."
They certainly did some 'The Shining'ish stuff in showing how batshit crazy off his ass Cid was. Long before I learned that he could explode you with his mind I still felt really uneasy about him. My impression was less "Oh, what a smart and creative little boy." and more "Oh sweet mother of fuck run away from the demonspawn as fast asyoucanAAAAAHHHFUCKFUCKFUUUUUCK!" Cid was the most terrifying character in the movie by orders of magnitude. At times I was rooting for Bruce Willis to take out the little bastard because holy shit he can just murder anyone he wants and he doesn't even know what he's doing! He could strip the Earth to the bedrock if we let him grow up unmurdered!
Never heard of 12 Monkeys. But I guess it takes a certain kind of person to gather an affinity for convoluted temporal mashups like this.
The premise of the movie is that in the future, it is impossible to get away with murder. Obviously, since Bruce Willis is there, the assassin survives to this point in time, but his job is now defunct. He's been killing people and getting away with it for years, probably having amassed a significant fortune since he would be paid in precious metals to prevent trying to use paper money before it was printed. So, with the end of his career on the horizon, and too old to learn a new trade (I'm assuming there aren't too many similar prospects in a world where murder becomes impossible,) the logical thing would be to retire, preferably to a nice island somewhere in Tahiti. But if you've killed a lot of people for money and were looking to retire, you'd probably want to cover your tracks, just to make sure no prior clients try to ask for a refund. So, our retiring assassin goes under the knife for some cosmetic surgery. A quick nose job, a little Botox, BOOM, new face.
It would have taken one scene with two bits of "advanced makeup" to pull of that bit: Older JGL character and then "younger" Bruce Willis character. Put them both on JGL's face, or on Bruce Willis' face, or hell, swap their faces around. One scene and two makeup effects would have been less draining than trying to maintain the illusion that JGL looks like BW throughout the entire movie, and it probably look better as a result.
Does it ruin Looper? Does it hamper Looper and draw you out of the story? I don't know. Again, I haven't seen it. But it seem to be, to me, a trend lately that one of two things happens regarding script-writing and editing: either the thing gets slashed to pieces, rewritten multiple times, and stapled together into one incoherent script by the movie execs (see, "The Amazing Spider Man") or very little is rewritten at all, even when the addition or omission of a scene or two would really tighten up the script. There seems to be very little middle ground in today's batch of scripts.
And I must say that I'm very glad that I caved to curiosity.
Thank you for recommending it, always a treat to watch metaphysical questions and chronological anomalies played out on the silver screen.
Oh, yes. Of course. Ahem...
*SPOILERS*
The one point I noticed that stuck out to me was their concept of time-travel was portrayed incorrectly.
The young Joe should not have been able to kill himself and remove old Joe from reality in the way that he did.
When old Joe traveled back into the past he should have created a vector and been reassigned into a new reality; completely separate from his "original" timeline where old Joe was killed by young Joe.
Granted, young Joe figured out that was how time worked in that particular reality that he inhabited by carving up his arm. However, my point remains that young Joe's suicide should not have caused old Joe to disappear from the vectored timeline.
In the "original" timestream, young Joe kills old Joe, lives to become old Joe and decides to return to the past in an attempt to save his wife's life by killing the Rainmaker.
So far, everything is linear and correct.
What should have happened when old Joe returned to the past and survived young Joe's blunderbuss is thus: he should have been able to carry on uninhibited without the fear of young Joe coming to harm because in old Joe's timeline he has already lived and become old Joe.
Old Joe's mind being altered was an interesting concept to sell their version of time travel but also implies that any time-traveler heading into the past becomes a shadow and could fade away at any second (as young Joe demonstrates) if a large enough change is performed to the timeline. Their logic demands that there is only one "timeline" that is ripped and navigated through instead of multiple offshoot tangents, which renders the entire concept of having a chronological fourth dimension moot. If time becomes non-incremental then it would collapse upon itself and cease to exist.
Otherwise I enjoyed the large majority of the movie. In hindsight, providing an interpretive version of reality and exploring it was immensely gratifying (whether or not that was the director's intention) and I would recommend Looper to friends and colleges that have not yet seen it, yet warn them of the torturous body gore squick, which was pivotally the lowest point of the movie.
*END SPOILERS*
I had glazed over it a bit now that I think about it, but the way that they totally took apart Joe's friend that also let his loop run was a bit unnecessarily brutal. Still, it functioned well enough as a dramatic device I suppose. Thanks for all the feedback!