Looper — R

Running Time: 118 min

Director: Rian Johnson

Leading Actors: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt

Picture a barren strip of land on the border of a cornfield, and a young man with slick black hair and a stout shotgun at the hip, waiting next to a broad white tarp as he checks his pocket-watch. And then instantaneously, a man with his hands bound behind his back and a bag over his head appears on the tarp, and a shotgun blast knocks him backward, lifeless. This grim scene is the world of Looper, where in the near future, time travel will be invented and outlawed immediately, and only used by organized crime syndicates for assassination. Looper doesn’t examine the practical, paradoxical implications of time travel, but rather the moral dilemmas created from it, and combining these sentiments with a popcorn-flick, action movie style.

The time-travel theme in many films is often regarded as cliché, and despite its surface-level appeal, redundant and boring. As outrageous as having a conversation with one’s future self may seem, it has been idly depicted so many times, that it loses entertaining value. But director Rian Johnson’s new film takes the predictable time-travel plot formula and turns it into a wonderful mesh of a mob/crime drama and a dystopian near future sci-fi. Johnson paints a vivid picture of the not-so-bright future with massive poverty, people with moderate genetically inherited telekinetic powers, euphoria-inducing drugs, and a rampant organized crime scene.

Joe, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises), one of these specialized assassins called “loopers”, is pitted against his older self, played by Bruce Willis (Die Hard, Pulp Fiction), who is sent back in time to be killed by his younger self, because his contract with the mob has ceased. Because Joe’s older self only remembers his previous actions right after his younger self performs them, what ensues is a full-scale representation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: by observing something, you change it. This aspect of the film makes a story that is not only engaging, but abstract and mind-bending.

Looper is a film that is born out of several different genres and story structures, but blended into something completely original. It has enough action to keep the audience engaged, and not too much to make it seem cheesy. It has enough moral sentiment to make the audience think, but not enough to seem preachy.  What Johnson has done here is taken the storytelling complexities of the time-travel genre, the intense, guns-blazing scenes of an action movie, a hint of brief, comedic moments, and made a recipe for a movie that is as touching as it is thrilling, and entertaining as it is thought-provoking.

“Looper” is rated “R” and Etched In Stone does not encourage or condone those who are under seventeen years of age to see this film.