Envision a future where time travel is possible, but illegal. Large criminal syndicates have all but replaced corporations and China is the number one superpower. The mobsters of the future send their enemies back in time to be killed by “Loopers.”
In my opinion, Looper brings much needed imagination to a genre that has become increasingly stale. Along with time travel, crime, and telekinesis, this film poses some serious moral questions regarding the killing of someone as a child before they have even become something that the killer wants to prevent. I loved how future America is portrayed as falling apart and yet the rich still live so large akin to other dystopian films and novels.
This film does an excellent job laying out the setting. America is falling apart, crime is rampant, people are fighting over food, fuel and cars. Looper has no qualms about painting a dystopian future.
The main character, Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), kills for a living. As a looper, he waits in a field every day for the latest victim from the future. However, I would have to liked to know more about why the future mob uses time travel. Of course, the movie does state that people in future are tracked and therefore cannot be murdered without law enforcement knowing.
I applaud Looper’s casting of Bruce Willis as Old Joe, and I must also mention that this is Willis’s second time traveling film, his first being Twelve Monkeys. It is kind of expected for him to go nuts and shoot everything up isn’t it? Looper delivers that.
One thing that I wished Looper went in depth into was story behind Abe (Jeff Daniels) and Kid Blue (Noah Segan). Abe is basically an advisor sent from the future to control the Loopers. But, the whole time I felt as if the movie was hinting that Kid Blue was Abe’s younger self, and it drove me crazy that they didn’t go more into that subject.
Halfway into the film a small love interest develops between Sara (Emily Blunt) and Young Joe. Sara’s child Cid just might be the Rainmaker of the future, a mob boss who uses telekinesis to take control of the syndicates. The Rainmaker is “closing the loops,” sending all the old loopers back in time to be murder by their younger selves. Old Joe’s objective is to kill the Rainmaker as a child before this happens. This little twist threw me for a *cough* loop, and I applaud the moral questions that go along with Old Joe’s motives.
I was born in Roseville. I moved to Olivehurst in 2007, and graduated from Lindhurst High School in 2011. I enjoy playing synthesizers and drums, as well as computer programming.
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