Looper

Written and directed by Rian Johnson, Looper stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe, who kills people in 2044 that are sent back in time 30 years by mob bosses in possession of time travel technology, and use it to dispose of all evidence of their crimes.
Loopers are so called because when the time comes, their future self (Joe’s played by Bruce Willis) will be sent back for them to kill, thus closing their loop.
But what happens if you let your loop run?
Jeff Daniels stars as Abe, the man sent back to run the Loopers and Emily Blunt is Sara, a cane grower caught up in Older Joe’s plans to change the future

Sometimes a film can just creep up without any warning, and be something completely unexpected. There haven’t been many films that do what Looper does.
Looper is… pretty much everything. It has the obvious time-travel and other sci-fi elements, but also looks deep into the heart of people.

Looper is in a whole separate league to almost anything else out there and definitely warrants multiple viewings.

9/10 just for its shear amount of balls.

***SPOILERS***

 It would appear from the ending scene that ‘Looper’ is a big ‘fuck you’ to everyone who would try and decipher it, but it also contains quite clear instructions that if you try to do so, you will spend all day trying to make sense of straw diragrams.
Lots of things in Looper are over-the-top and ridiculous, but it is also so tied down to its apparent reality.
The end of the film completely negates everything that happens within it: When Joe shoots himself (with his conveniently extremely inaccurate weapon) the future of both himself and the future bad-guy ‘The Rainmaker’ are completely unwritten. If Sid choses good paths over bad then future Joe would not have been captured and got into the time machine. The time machine in question would not even have been ordered to be put there by him. Perhaps time travel technology may not have even been invented, or not used badly or outlawed.

The older John appears to become less and less concerned about his past and only focused on his present mission, but the script again covers itself with his fuzzy memory. No wonder he stops looking at the picture of his wife if his whole history with her is to be erased.

Also, what happened to the second child? Joe didn’t kill it. And you never see what happened to its mother. What if that child was really the Rainmaker, and Joe knocked her down and it somehow led to her death? That could be a whole other movie, with Sid being the other side to the Rainmaker coin.

Looper does so well at exploring what a mind/reality fuck putting something like time travel into the world would be. No wonder they outlawed it.

Both the future/past communication mechanic and the resulting slice-and-dice ‘letting your Looper run’ scene are extremely clever and pretty horrific. Also the latter is a pretty big paradoxical mess that occurs well before the climax: How does a Loop run without his feet?

I really like the big Terminator-esque question Looper raises: What if you were the Terminator and John Connor was going to be the bad guy? Or better still; what if you could give him the choice?

Looper itself is really a massive paradox: It wants you to think about it, but tells you shouldn’t. It shows you a child killer and makes you feel for him. It’s both ridiculous and subtle, so believable and yet so grounded.

Everything feels like it’s headed somewhere, and yet and hasn’t gone anywhere at all.

The loops are both running free and trapped in an infinite circle.