Looper

Looper is a solidly thought out and well-shot and narrated "semi-indie" sci-fi film, which actually only takes a proven foundation and adds nothing new to it. So if you've seen "time travel" classics like Donnie Darko or 12 Monkeys (or The Butterfly Effect and others), it will become clear to you in the middle of the film that someone who returns from the future to fix the past tends to find out that his actions are part of the events he seeks to prevent. And unfortunately, the film goes along these tracks without any surprises and any significant excitement. After a fairly fresh introduction, an overly sleepy passage comes in the second half, which tries to motivate the rebirth of the hero's younger self. It makes sense, it doesn't offend, but at the same time it's not a big deal - rather a solidly written conversation film. Johnson works a lot with the characters, less with the world, which is more so sketched out (one must wonder why it's full of trailer trash, why people are so disgusting to each other and why there is a Zen oasis on the other half of the globe). Willis' storyline brings more adrenaline, but also shallow poses, awkward action and love clichés. The two selves meet in an excellent scene in a bistro, but then they each go their down their own storylines until the loop closes. Looper confirms the trend of "intelligent genre films with a lower budget" (Source Code, The Adjustment Bureau, Moon, In Time), which surpass the mainstream with their ambition and authorial vision. But they almost always lack an essential piece in order to achieve perfection. Most likely the piece that would significantly disrupt the well-known genre rules - it is best described by Willis, who, when mentioning a complex time paradox, says something to his younger self in the sense of: "We would have to sit here overnight and draw on piles of napkins. Just believe that things are this way." In the end, the trap is not unlike the one in which their more expensive friends hang. [75%] (10/08/2012)

Complicated, narratively muddled, and considerably unpolished. The director didn't even understand the basic thing that if you have a low-budget sci-fi film, you can't afford panoramic shots or city and traffic scenes, because if in 2044 you see a Toyota Yaris driving on the road, that's probably not entirely right. Only the smaller role of Emily Blunt and the excellently stylized Joseph Gordon-Levitt are good, he perfectly captures not only the appearance of a young Bruce Willis, but also his facial expressions and delivers great looks and lines precisely in his younger style, and it works great. Not a timeless film for sure, not very high-quality either, rather unusual, perhaps, but that's not enough. (01/20/2013)

A great premise, an interesting execution. Looper might not be perfect and it has a whole lot of holes, but on the other hand, it tries to be unconventional, original and quite unusual – successfully so. After all, it can’t be easy to come up with a time travel story, so stasis will probably always have one or twoholes in it. On the other hand, Gordon-Levitt, Willis, Blunt and Daniels are making up for it perfectly. The rather slow and difficult start is then saved by the story, which is unpredictable in each passing minute, even though it makes you think that it isn’t. And that’s basically the nitty-gritty. Looper is an excellent idea and I must tip my hat off to anyone who decides to pursue these kinds of ideas. It’s actually a suicide mission in a sense that you’ll either fall in love with or you’ll just get pissed off. And I must say that I am leaning towards the prior. And when it comes to Bruce Willis? He’s a sweetheart, finally a movie where his character has a purpose, even if he doesn’t speak as much as I’d like. (06/28/2013)

After the opening twenty minutes, I was prepared for a futuristic variation on existential crime films along the lines of Le Samouraï. However, Rian Johnson directs with much less focus than the precise Melville. Thought the result doesn’t fall apart like The Brothers Bloom, the film still lacks a uniform style. Despite the absolutely serious and very impressive cutaways into the mechanised life of a hired assassin (though it somehow wasn’t clear to me why the targets aren’t sent back in time already dead), Looper also contains farcical black humour, a saccharine romance, brutal “Rambo” action and a bit of telekinesis for beginners (not to mention the very western-style final conflict on the street). Johnson switches not only between a lot of genres, but also between a lot of narrators. Though the narrative thus unfolds in an interesting way, it doesn’t ultimately lead to any surprising “convergence” into a unified point.  The use of multiple points of view essentially only confirms the truth of my favourite line from The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” I’m afraid that the attempt to apply Bordwell’s forking-path model of narration to the film, placing in front of us two human minds influencing each other instead of two time planes, would lead us up a blind alley (though I would like to have this assumption refuted by a second viewing). More important than the time paradoxes for Johnson are the moral dilemmas with which the characters are confronted and which force us to constantly assess the situation from an emotional perspective. To whom does the future belong? Where does the line between a wasted and fulfilled life lead? What right do we have to make decisions for others? Here the non-Hollywood-style desperate fatefulness appears again, but repackaged in a more familiar, family-melodrama wrapper. I believe that if Johnson had stuck with a short runtime, as was the original plan, Looper would have been a great film about which geeks would tweet enthusiastically from the whole known internet world. As it stands, however, it is a very imaginative film that is more about sense than sensibility in conflict with its dominant sci-fi genre. 80% (10/08/2012)

At last a proper sci-fi. The nutritious story wrings everything it can from the topic of time travel. Rian Johnson first sketches the basic premise, then later enriching it with other added value and manages not to lose his way. Bruce is on best form (in terms of action and acting) and Joe just confirms his place as one of today’s best young actors, even under a thick layer of makeup. And moreover we have the incredibly well-cast kid who is a pest, a bit of a psycho, but still you find yourself rooting for him at least a little. The low budget turned the year 2044 into a horrible urban cesspit or an empty field in Kansas. This gives the picture the proper atmosphere where everything is more or less... gray. Anyone who compares this with Terminator was just stupidly concentrating on Willis’s storyline, while this movie isn’t really about him and don’t think you’ll get 12 Monkeys here, Looper has a long way to go to get to that. In any case, I want to watch this again soon. (10/11/2012)