Looper

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (with a brand new Bruce Willis nose) and Bruce Willis (with his existing Bruce Willis nose) in "Looper."

"Looper" was great.  You should go see it.

I mean, unless you're a small child or something.  If you're a small child, don't go see "Looper," you'd find it disturbing.  Also, stop reading my blog, it contains bad words that are only intended for grownups.

Finally, we have a time travel movie that's smart enough to stop wanking about the deep paradoxical ramifications of what it would mean if you could go and become your own damn grandfather or something, and instead recognizes that time travel, among other things, is a plot device that can be used well or poorly.  "Looper" uses it well.  The rules are clearly explained, and then they end up being important in terms of difficult choices the characters must make.  Butterflies flapping their wings and setting in motion cascades of events that alter the course of human history are not mentioned, because who gives a shit, really?

So it's 2044, and time travel hasn't been invented yet but it will be soon.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a looper, which means that organized criminals in the near future send victims back through time to a prearranged location where he's waiting with a gun.  He shoots them and disposes of the bodies.  Nobody in the present is looking for them, and nobody in the future can find them.  The victims arrive hooded and unrecognizable, with the looper's pay strapped to them in the form of silver bars.  The hood is important because eventually the victim will be an older version of the looper himself, loaded up with a big final payday in gold instead of silver.  By shooting himself, in the terminology of the movie, the looper "closes his loop."  After that, he's rich and he has thirty years until the mob finds him and sends him back to be executed by himself.  Why send loopers to themselves?  There are several possible answers to this question and one is that it makes quite an interesting premise for a movie.

Unfortunately for the organized criminals who will eventually try to have Joseph Gordon-Levitt whacked, he grows up into Bruce Willis.  Old Bruce Willis appears in front of young Joseph Gordon-Levitt with no hood, a definite will to live, and some disturbing information about the future.  Things start to unravel from there.

The world of "Looper" is rich and complex.  Many details we can see hint at others that we can't.  Lots of people in this future are desperately poor, and not in a stylish cyberpunk living-in-a-big-shiny-city-where-it-rains-all-the-time-and-everybody-has-a-flying-car-and-there's-lots-of-interactive-advertising-and-neon-signs-in-korean-hangul kind of way, more in a skinny, dirty, hopeless, powerless, drug-addicted kind of way.  And society doesn't seem to have gotten that way because we had some kind of epic war with sentient robots, either; although no explanation is given, it kind of looks like we did this to ourselves.  More than one old car looks like a rusty Prius covered in beat-up solar panels.  The most common drug is not snorted or injected, but instead comes in the form of eye drops that make your eyes turn green.  People still eat in diners and drink Budweiser.  And although a small subset of the population has become mildly telekinetic, most people just use this newfound power to do douchey bar tricks with quarters.

There's also a wonderful performance from a child.  Lots of great film performances are the result of a talented actor working with a talented director, and this is especially true of child actors.  A very young actor named Pierce Gagnon holds his own in a movie with lots of great performances from adults, playing a character who is at once very childlike and very un-childlike.

I don't want to tell you anything else about "Looper" other than that you should see it.  Part of the pleasure of a time travel movie comes from watching the characters run a maze, and this one wraps you up and keeps twisting and branching and unfolding until it leaves nothing but fun questions to talk to your friends about as you walk out of the theater.