Looper

My future self has come back to tell me that there are no spoilers in this so it’s all okay. Looper is a film that if you’re well versed with Doctor Who is timey wimey. It is the tale of Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt), a hit man in our future who kills people from his future, after they’re sent back in time to a field outside of New Orleans. He shoots them with a blunderbuss, collects two silver bars from their body and burns them. This is all explained via a voice over; I bet there’ll be a version without the voice over in the future.

Anyway these hit men are also called loopers because of their victims looping back in time to them. The loopers eventually end up killing their own future self, get a big payoff and retire on a big pile of gold bars. This all works swimmingly for Joe until his future self comes back and it turns out to be Bruce Willis. This sends him into a metaphysical nightmare, this explains why he has this prosthetic forehead but still somehow his head will change shape in the next thirty years.

You’d think that it would remarkable enough for their just to be time travel in this film. Oh no, we have telekinesis as well, something you need to pay attention to really. It’s well and good this story of organised crime and how criminals will one day be the only people that use time travel after its been made illegal. I found myself wondering throughout the film, where are the Police? Also there were a lot of destitute people wandering around the streets of New Orleans; does this mean the government is completely ineffectual in 2044? Someone though had spent a lot of time adapting cars to new fuels, after all the oil had run out.

It’s not necessarily a bad film, but it does require an amount of suspension of disbelief. It does confirm that criminals in the future will be just as devious as they are now in their actions. If there is no law enforcement in the future then why should they have to be so devious and use all that energy to send people into the past to be killed?