Review for Looper

Introduction

As I sat down to watch Looper, around 9 months after I had actually bought it, I reflected on how my movie-watching habits had changed. I used to be an avid cinema-goer; it was a rare week that I wasn’t in a multiplex partaking of the latest release. But it’s been years now since I last set foot in a cinema. A big reason now is that when I can have on Blu-ray, on the day of release, a feature film for around the same price as a day out at the cinema, it becomes an easy decision. Cinema today is less about the movie, and more about the experience, the ability to dine while watching your film instead of just nibble at choccies and popcorn, the comfort of the sofa that you are sitting on, the chill on the beer. And then there are other people, who I have become increasingly intolerant of as the years have passed, and the brightness of smartphone screens has increased. What part of “Turn them off!” don’t you understand? Why bother with all that, when I can watch the movie in the privacy of my own home, in HD clarity with surround sound?

Another part of it is the familiarity I’ve developed with the Hollywood mainstream. Identikit summer blockbusters have long since lost their attraction, and while I still love sci-fi and action and all the things that got me into cinema in the first place, originality in these genres is increasingly becoming an endangered species. Of all the sci-fi features that have come out in recent years, it’s only been Looper that has seemed striking enough, original enough to attract my attention, to the point where I almost wandered into a cinema again. I was finally tempted into a purchase by its trailer, intrigued enough by a premise to actually be there at the day of release to pick up the Blu-ray. Maybe I have seen a little too much in the way of Hollywood movies. Last night, I finally watched Looper, and despite the initial novelty of its set-up, and despite a refreshingly down to earth approach to its cinematography (not a CGI-fest), it turned out to once more revisit well-trodden Hollywood ground, albeit with a radical twist.


In the year 2044 there’s no such thing as time travel, but people can still get away with murder. Thirty years hence, time travel has been invented, promptly been banned, and has fallen into the hands of crime syndicates. But thirty years hence, it’s a lot harder to get away with killing someone. The solution is simple, just send your target back in time where they are swiftly dispatched and their bodies disposed of. The hitmen hired to perform this grisly task are called Loopers, and young Joe has been earning a lucrative living, occasionally visiting a field with a shotgun, waiting for a hooded and bound figure to appear before blowing him away, and then collecting the silver strapped to the corpse’s back. But there are always loose ends, and Loopers’ contracts are concluded when the Loop is closed, that is their future self is sent back to the past to be killed at the hands of their younger selves. The consequences of not fulfilling the contract can be unpleasant. Then one day, the target that appears before Joe isn’t hooded, and he isn’t bound, and the face is very familiar. Old Joe isn’t ready to die just yet, in fact he’s back in the past for a very specific purpose, and he’s not going to let his younger self get in the way.

Picture

Looper gets a 2.35:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p resolution. It’s a recent film and it looks pristine, and quite frankly I was too caught up in the story to notice any deficiencies in the transfer. One thing that I did notice, and confirmed in the end credits and on-line is that Looper was actually shot on film. That’s the plastic stuff with chemicals that they put in mechanical cameras, expose to light, and then develop in a laboratory so that an image forms. It looks fantastic, living and breathing as a piece of cinema, the little flaws in the film, the anamorphic lensing, and the grain. It immediately shows up that as perfect as it is, digital cinematography still has a long way to go before it matches the warmth of analogue cinema. You can also see in the extra features that a lot of the effects shots were actually created practically, flying bikes on rigs, floating objects on wires, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Bruce make-up, with computer effects used sparingly really just to clean the image. In many ways Looper is an old school movie, and I found that I appreciated watching it all the more because of it.

Sound

You have the choice between DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround English and PCM 2.0 Stereo English, with English HOH subtitles. It’s a good, effective surround track, making full use of the soundstage to immerse us in the world of 2044, with the action represented with bombast, and the music score driving the pace of the film well. It is however one of the films that conforms to modern sound design principles, keep the dialogue low, but whack the action up full. You’ll either be riding herd on the volume control, or have very forgiving neighbours.

Extras

Looper is presented in an Amaray style Blu-ray case, which comes wrapped in a Lenticular O-ring sleeve, with shifting images of both young and old Joe.

Insert the disc and it autoplays trailers for The Impossible, Bullet to the Head, The Sweeney, and Hammer of the Gods. It also then plays an advert for chocolates. If I wanted to watch a grocery advert, I’d watch the wretched thing on TV. Imbeciles! You just won’t let me get away from the cinema ‘experience’!

The Blu-ray gets the usual animated menu, but the images playing in the background have a tendency to obscure the highlighted menu option.


You’ll have to go to the Set-Up menu, but that’s where you’ll find the audio commentary with Director Rian Johnson, and actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Emily Blunt. It’s a nice commentary to listen to, detailed and informative, but it’s one that concentrates on the creative process rather than the story.

The rest of the extra features are accessible from the Bonus Features menu, beginning with Looper: From The Beginning, which lasts 8 minutes and has the cast and crew getting all press-junkety about the film.

Of a little more interest is Scoring Looper (16 minutes), which has composer Nathan Johnson describe how he came up with the film’s rather unique score, and his interesting approach to orchestration.

There are 21 deleted scenes on this disc, running to a total of 33⅓ minutes. You can watch them individually, play all, and with optional commentary from Director Rian Johnson and actor Noah Segan.

The animated trailer for Looper lasts 1½ minutes.


Finally there are a trio of short featurettes for the film, The Science of Time Travel (8½ mins) has How To Build a Time Machine author Brian Clegg look at the rules of time travel in the film, New Future, Old School (3 mins) takes a look at the practical effects work and the film’s production design, and The Two Joes (5 mins) has a look at how Joseph Gordon-Levitt was turned into a young Bruce Willis. These three featurettes do repeat a fair bit of material from that brief making of.

Conclusion

Looper is a smart, stylish and entertaining thriller, one that engages and holds the attention through its 2 hour running time without faltering once. It also supplies the edge of the seat summer-blockbuster thrills without having to resort to any of the summer blockbuster clichés or eye-popping CGI eye-candy. But you have to make allowances for the fact that it proceeds from an utterly dumb premise. Time travel movies are like that. Give them more than five minutes of thought, and you’ll be picking more holes in them than a lace curtain.


Here the premise is that in the future, where time travel exists, the law is such that it is practically impossible for a criminal to get away with murder. The solution for the career criminal in this future utopia is to abduct the target, send him to the past where he can be murdered with impunity. Forget that scene which shows one such abduction, and the sight of a bystander being shot, which sort of negates the whole premise anyway. If someone goes missing, and there is evidence of abduction, won’t the future police arrest the abductors; can’t murder charges be brought without a corpse, just as they can be today? And if the law is so strict... Hello, time machine... send someone back in time to bribe a Supreme Court judge and get the law changed. Come to think of it, even if it is a one way trip, why waste your time with murder? Three words for you... “Gray’s Sports Almanac.”

So daft premise indeed, but the movie makes the most of it, excelling by focusing on character rather than the mechanics of the plot, although it does take a delightfully ‘Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey’ approach to cause and effect. After the story is set up, the first half of the movie is a brilliant and inventive thriller, using the concept of the Looper as its basis. You have young Joe, the Looper, hitman to incoming time-travellers faced with the end of his contract and having to close his loop, that is kill his older self. The consequences if he fails to do this are extreme, as demonstrated when his friend Seth fails to close his loop, so young Joe is more than motivated to find and kill old Joe. Old Joe on the other hand is faced with the quandary of not only staying alive himself, but having to keep his younger self alive and unharmed too, so he’s in the ironic position of having to save the man who’s trying to kill him.


This is an intriguing notion, and I would have loved if Looper had stuck with it and saw it through. It would have been an interesting and convoluted chase movie that I believe would have sustained through the runtime. Instead halfway through Looper becomes something else completely, which would have been disappointing, were it not that it still manages to carry it off effectively. It becomes a Terminator movie, albeit with the twist that the Terminator and Kyle Reese are the same person. It also has the irony that the villain winds up being the hero, and the hero turns out to be the villain. It’s not a surprise development, as the film has been setting up the premise from the start, with the introduction of people with telekinetic abilities, and the mention of a character in the future called the Rainmaker.

Looper is an entertaining movie, with a lot more under the covers than just the usual summer blockbuster. Most importantly, it’s a character based action thriller, which allows the viewer to engage with the story more strongly. It’s a bit of a shame that the initial direction of the story wasn’t allowed to maintain till the end of the film, but the final act is rewarding and entertaining in its own right. As so often happens, the time travel aspects of the film are a bit of a mess, and there are plot holes galore, loose ends left hanging, and you may just end the movie with a frown on your brow. The movie is great fun to watch though, the presentation on this disc is impeccable, but I have to say that the extra features with the disc are somewhat disappointing. No doubt there will be a special edition one day.