Looper by Rian Johnson (review)

Writer-director Rian Johnson locates Looper within a prolific subgenre of sf films; its title refers to time-travel terminology – the paradox of a continuous loop caused by past and future events being dependent on each other – and, within the diegesis, to an occupation: Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who starred in Johnson’s début feature, the genre-bending high school noir murder mystery Brick (US 2005), is an assassin known as a looper. Loopers are so-named because they accept that one day the target will be their future self (interestingly, all loopers are male, although this fact is never addressed in the film). This homicide/suicide is known as ‘closing the loop’, ensuring the consequences of time travel are fully contained.

Fourth-dimensional travel is always problematic; its paradoxical nature raises countless hypothetical and theoretical questions, which, so far, cannot be answered. Its exploitation as a device in film offers a multitude of variations: travellers into the future often discover a negatively evolved Earth, demonstrated in films such as The Time Machine (Pal US 1960), Planet of the Apes (Schaffner US 1968) and Idiocracy (Judge US 2006). Yet it is travelling backwards in time, rather than forwards, that provides a more extensive opportunity to consider potential outcomes. Looper sits most comfortably among the films that address these issues, and is thematically influenced by the likes of The Terminator (Cameron US 1984) and Twelve Monkeys (Gilliam US 1995), both of which consider the complicated loops created by interference from the future.

Wisely, Johnson’s screenplay deliberately avoids being overwhelmed by semantics. Abe (Jeff Daniels), sent from the future (2074) to manage the loopers in the present (2044), glibly states, ‘This time travel crap just fries your brain like an egg.’ Later, Old Joe (Bruce Willis) tells his younger self, ‘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, making diagrams with straws’, directly acknowledging the inevitable confusion. Logically dissecting a hypothetical situation reveals inconsistencies, and it is difficult to think of any film featuring time travel that has done so. Instead, it is more useful to consider whether the internal logic of the device works within each individual film and, for the most part, Looper is successful in this regard. Johnson asks the viewer to accept time-travel’s existence and to concentrate on its impact rather than its technicalities. (For those who desire to discuss its specifics, complicated debates can be found in online forums.) Yet its impact is inextricably connected to these technicalities: Old Joe’s motivations depend entirely on his personal understanding of time travel, which is not to say that it is correct. More interesting is the relationship between the two Joes and the questions raised by their simultaneous existence.

Joe’s problems arise when his future self appears as his latest target. Arriving late, unbound and unmasked, Old Joe’s unusual appearance causes Joe to pause for a second and Old Joe escapes. Joe’s sense of preservation does not extend to his future self: his concerns are only for his present body and his plans for the future. Joe does not feel any empathy for or connection with Old Joe, and the latter’s motivations are as alien to him as any stranger’s. ‘It happened to you’, Joe tells his older counterpart, ‘It doesn’t have to happen to me.’ Whereas Old Joe’s existence is dependent on the survival of Joe, Joe’s survival depends on the death (non-existence) of Old Joe; in contrast, Old Joe’s body relies on Joe’s continuing good health, but his memories are potentially altered by decisions Joe makes as a result of Old Joe’s interference with the present (Old Joe’s past).

Looper has a number of interesting motifs: the logic of time travel; the moral issues raised by this technology (if the film had to be reduced to one question, surely it would be...