This Is Going to Take a Long Time

Rating: 6/10 (8 October 2012)

Looper is about how in the future, time travel has been invented, but is illegal. At the same time (literally), getting rid of bodies in the future is very hard. So they send the (alive) victims 30 years into the past, where a specialized assassin (called a Looper) is waiting to shoot him down and burn the body. I won't go into too much detail in this summary, because I will just be hurting my psyche.
I was looking forward to Looper. I thought it looked interesting from the trailers. And when everyone said it was great, I was looking forward to it even more. But when I saw it, I was disappointed. Where do I start? I guess I'm gonna have to analyze the movie a bit.
The movie starts off with the main character (who is a Looper). He does the things he does. He shoots down a body from the future, burns it, goes home, gets drunk and wakes up for another day of doing the exact same thing. This part of the movie is interesting, I guess. It gives us a good idea of the depressing and boring every-day life of a Looper.
We are introduced to our main character's friend, who is also a Looper. A few scenes after this, we will learn that someone has sent his older self to him at work so he can kill himself ... yeah, I know. Apparently, this is called "closing the loop". It means that the Looper is free from the contract and ... well, the movie doesn't really do a good job on explaining what happens next. Realistically, it would just result in a time paradox.
Later, the same thing happens to our main character, but his older self escapes and the main character has to hunt down himself. He ends up in a farm where a pretty lady and her son live. It turns out the main character's future self is out for the boy because if the boy grows up, he will be responsible for the bleak and unfair future that the main character's older-self lives in.
While it does contain many plot holes, the story is overall interesting and original. But it's the way that it's told that is disappointing. The movie decides to tell us what's going on, instead of showing, most of the time. This not only makes it cryptic, but also boring and it shows lack of effort.
The movie mostly takes place on the lady and her son's farm. The setting looks like it was taken directly from Signs (2002), filled with colorless cornfields and everything. But that's the problem: The movie doesn't show us how the future is bleak (except for the main character's old self's wife getting killed there). It doesn't show us what happens to the main character's friend. It just shows us a farm, where we have to HEAR what happens.
I feel that Looper is an interesting movie, but could have been better if it was done with more showing and less telling. I don't see why so many people love it. The actual movie is kind of lazy.