Fight your present, face your past, forget your future..?

Rating: 6/10 (14 December 2012)

As always when it comes to time travel themed movies it inevitably raises a few questions regarding the applied theories, and I guess there are different ways to approach the matter. The way I see it there's the "Back to the Future way" which is sort of a tongue-in-cheek approach, and there's the "Terminator way" which is more of an absolute-truth approach. "Looper" does however try to move focus away from the time travel theory babble and instead concentrate on the storytelling. Normally I'd enjoy a story digging into the complexity and paradoxes of time travel, but in this case this strategy works to the movie's advantage, at least to some extent. It's like the movie makers are saying: "We're not supposed to understand this anyway", so it's tempting to just leave it at that. I'm initially convinced of the theories' irrelevance.
The film's main character is Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who works for the mafia as a Looper. Loopers execute people sent back from the future by the mob, as a way of disposing people without detection. Joe is seemingly living an enjoyable life consisting of money, parties, girls, drugs, and some assassinations every now and then. The movie has a nice style to it. Music, editing and pace occasionally make it feel almost like a sixties or seventies movie, but in a smooth and not very obvious fashion. The narrator voice also gives it a noir touch which suits this story well, although as time progresses the movie goes through something of a transformation when it comes to tone and feel, and it doesn't quite end in the same manner it started.
I've lately grown fond of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as an actor, although this might not be his strongest performance so far. Casting in general is fine but not outstanding. Pierce Gagnon is however absolutely brilliant in his role, and I hope to see much more of him in the future.
Anyway, one day Joe find himself aiming a gun at his thirty years older counterpart and things take a turn for the worse. Young Joe (Gordon- Levitt) and old Joe (Bruce Willis) engage in pursuing different possible timelines, i.e. different possible eventualities. This is what I liked the most about the movie - the fact that the story is driven not by the standard good guy-bad guy dispute, but rather the conflict of interest between the two Joes, who essentially are one and the same person. It's exciting to think you know exactly what's going to happen because of old Joe's spent life and memories, and at the same time not knowing anything about forthcoming events because of young Joe's persistence to control his present life. Paradoxically this is also the biggest problem with "Looper". Since it avoids to establish some sort of rules of how time travel in the film's reality works, it's hard sometimes to understand why events play out the way they do, how the present affects the future, etc. I appreciate the different style of the movie and its attempt to uncomplicate the time travel business in favor of the story's depth, but I can't help but feeling this is also an attempt to cover up possible plot holes. When it comes down to it there are certain things you have to explain when making a movie of this sort, and you can't really get away from that. All in all this is an interesting story told in an unusual and inspiring way, but it partially fails to explain itself.