In Love With Looper

I’m barely going to tell you what this movie is about. I’m not going to get you to watch a trailer for the movie either. I don’t want to spoil it. It would be a sin to spoil it. The Gods of Cinema would smite me from their filmreel in the sky if I was to ruin this for you.

This is all you need to know:

Looper is set in 2044. Time travel hasn’t been invented yet. But it will be. Further in the future, when someone needs to be killed, they are sent back in time, to be murdered by people called Loopers. Loopers are guns for hire. Joe is one of them. When his future self is sent back as his target, Joe is taken down a path he can’t turn back from.

If that isn’t enough for you, then go see the movie. Seriously. Here’s why.

Looper is one of the smartest sci-fi movies I have ever seen. But it’s also accessible. It leads the viewer well without needing to beat the viewer over the head with it’s points. It’s a thriller, it has understandable violence, it has deep emotion, and it tackles moral issues in a way that had my friends and I debating the movie for hours after we saw it. It has layers that don’t need to be talked about, presenting a depressing, but realistic future that we only need to see through the eyes of the characters journey’s to understand.

And the characters, oh YES.

Joseph-Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis are phenomenal, to the point where I forgot, completely, that Levitt was an actor. I only identified with him as his character. They are supported by a cast that doesn’t stick out, if only for the fact that all of their characters have real and understandable motivations to do the things that they do. Also, there is a child actor in the movie, and he subtly steals the show.

This is one of the first movies where at no point did I think…why did a character do that, why would someone want this to happen, why would someone have…no…I never thought those things. And I’m always very critical of the movies that I watch.

Maybe a second viewing will bring more things to light, but I don’t think so. After watching Looper, my friends and I just sat in the theatre, quietly and thoroughly satisfied. Only later did we start talking about the moral questions the movie raised, and that is the mark of a good sci-fi movie.

I’m going to see Looper again on Wednesday. And you should too. Looper makes me fall in love with movies all over again.