Looper

At last a proper sci-fi. The nutritious story wrings everything it can from the topic of time travel. Rian Johnson first sketches the basic premise, then later enriching it with other added value and manages not to lose his way. Bruce is on best form (in terms of action and acting) and Joe just confirms his place as one of today’s best young actors, even under a thick layer of makeup. And moreover we have the incredibly well-cast kid who is a pest, a bit of a psycho, but still you find yourself rooting for him at least a little. The low budget turned the year 2044 into a horrible urban cesspit or an empty field in Kansas. This gives the picture the proper atmosphere where everything is more or less... gray. Anyone who compares this with Terminator was just stupidly concentrating on Willis’s storyline, while this movie isn’t really about him and don’t think you’ll get 12 Monkeys here, Looper has a long way to go to get to that. In any case, I want to watch this again soon. (2012-10-11)

The greatest strength of the rough futuristic junkyard is in the confident echo it leaves behind. It was running through my mind even long after I left the cinema, I kept thinking about the individual plot lines, and my joy is mostly spoiled by the fact that the more I ponder, the more logical inconsistencies and paradoxes I find. That said, thanks to the perfect casting with the unwavering Bruce Willis at the forefront, it is a joy to watch this genre mix. The sympathetically uncompromising form makes it easier to overlook the narrative errors. 70% and rounding up for Rian Johnson's undeniable courage. (2012-10-24)

In prehistoric times, when I was a boy reading Anderson's "Annals of the Time Patrol," I wondered how difficult it is to write (or shoot) sci-fi with time travel themes and not fall into the trap of a time paradox that has the ability to turn the story into an absurd farce. However, the problem of a time paradox is not what makes Looper unbearable in my eyes. Johnson's film is a typical summer blockbuster, which doesn't worry about illogical slip-ups in the script or rushed and bizarre relationship building. It offers potentially interesting themes, but it processes them or barely touches on them in a superficial way. The directing is routine and so is Bruce Willis' performance, which functions as a worn-out template for action heroes. Twelve Monkeys once proved that it is possible to create a smart, cultivated, and entertaining genre film about such a difficult-to-grasp phenomenon as time travel. In comparison to Gilliam's film, Looper is quite a bit worse. Overall impression: 40%. (2022-02-05)

After the opening twenty minutes, I was prepared for a futuristic variation on existential crime films along the lines of Le Samouraï. However, Rian Johnson directs with much less focus than the precise Melville. Thought the result doesn’t fall apart like The Brothers Bloom, the film still lacks a uniform style. Despite the absolutely serious and very impressive cutaways into the mechanised life of a hired assassin (though it somehow wasn’t clear to me why the targets aren’t sent back in time already dead), Looper also contains farcical black humour, a saccharine romance, brutal “Rambo” action and a bit of telekinesis for beginners (not to mention the very western-style final conflict on the street). Johnson switches not only between a lot of genres, but also between a lot of narrators. Though the narrative thus unfolds in an interesting way, it doesn’t ultimately lead to any surprising “convergence” into a unified point.  The use of multiple points of view essentially only confirms the truth of my favourite line from The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” I’m afraid that the attempt to apply Bordwell’s forking-path model of narration to the film, placing in front of us two human minds influencing each other instead of two time planes, would lead us up a blind alley (though I would like to have this assumption refuted by a second viewing). More important than the time paradoxes for Johnson are the moral dilemmas with which the characters are confronted and which force us to constantly assess the situation from an emotional perspective. To whom does the future belong? Where does the line between a wasted and fulfilled life lead? What right do we have to make decisions for others? Here the non-Hollywood-style desperate fatefulness appears again, but repackaged in a more familiar, family-melodrama wrapper. I believe that if Johnson had stuck with a short runtime, as was the original plan, Looper would have been a great film about which geeks would tweet enthusiastically from the whole known internet world. As it stands, however, it is a very imaginative film that is more about sense than sensibility in conflict with its dominant sci-fi genre. 80% (2012-10-08)

A Terminator wannabe and the stupidest science fiction movie among the intelligent ones. Longwinded; after the opening few minutes completely without ideas; set in the future only for effect; it is shamefully superficial, it has no rules (neither for time travel nor the simple laws of action/reaction; for instance, the reason behind getting rid of people in such a complex, costly and uncertain way, which it later completely denies), but it has the most annoying child around... It wouldn't matter with a dumb popcorn action movie, but with a movie supposedly based on its "smartness", it makes you want to slap the filmmakers in the face. So there are precisely two pros; the opening quarter of an hour before the well of ideas dries out, and Willis’ dialog-less scene at the first meeting. Just disappointing. And yet it's the best non-action science fiction since Source Code. Which is darn sad. (2012-10-11)