movie hallucination

Rating: 10/10 (2 November 2012)

Memories that fade and disappear, feelings that rise out of nothingness. Disconnected parts of ourself. Overwhelmed by the narcotic power of movies; the essence of flickering lights. Falling down the rabbit hole, chasing your own shadow; a you you can no longer understand. Frame by frame our mind constructs a coherent whole with a singular inevitable direction, meaning. Escape your fate, feel it changing; the exhilaration of freedom, the danger of it.
The above fragments are what came to me after watching this film.
Looper is an action movie with a sci-fi plot revolving around hit men who kill people sent back from the future. The concept here is that one of these hit men has to kill an older version of himself and once he knows this he can alter the future and the past by knowing what is going to happen to him in the future.
Obviously, Looper refers to the 'Back to the Future' trilogy but here it becomes a metaphor for life and the soul; something almost spiritualistic.
It's pointless to cite all the cinematic references in Looper, the point of the film is to draw on a whole language of cinema and through the mastery of the language renew it.
Looper is a mind-blowing experience - unless you get too fussy about plot logic and miss the point - it's the kind of rare movie that can call itself an instant classic. The camera-work, the acting, the music, the editing, the script; everything is brilliant.
This is a truly original and surprising work which functions on several levels: a genre film, an essay on artistic influence and memory, a cubist work on redemption and remorse...
At heart Looper is a fantasy; a heroic-fantasy and an artistic puzzle. Inception and Source Code have both recently covered similar territory with flawed or cursed characters immersed in a dream-logic and written as a narcotic form of mythomania.
As an experience Looper is thrilling, unsettling and sublime. It is also great fun; Hugo Cabret was also a similar experience although on the surface very different, Hugo Cabret dealt with a time machine from the past; the lost films of Méliès and their destruction by the coming of a new future. In Looper the future threatens the past with its self-awareness, is this a comment on the future of cinema? If Looper is the future of cinema then we're all safe.
At the end of Kurosawa's Rashomon a baby is left in the hands of a stranger, the question posed was 'can we trust our fellow man?' Looper poses a similar question but goes further and asks, 'can we trust ourselves?' can we believe in ourselves, even if we know we've made mistakes in the past can we change things for the better, make a better future, is there hope for humanity? This philosophical ambition and weight elevates the nature of the film itself and makes the difference between pure entertainment and art.