The Past In The Future.

Rating: 10/10 (27 September 2012)

To begin, Looper is a sci-fi film set in the future, dealing with the implications of time-travel, although it is very much a film about the past. The film is all about the past, how it affects the present and the future and how it drives people with the majority of the film building characters and establishing plot.
Anyone looking for an action film will be sorely disappointed because this is first and foremost a writer's film, focusing on plot, character and dialogue. As mentioned above, the brunt of the film falls on development, more so than action set-pieces and CGI. The portions of the city and the near future Johnson has created, whilst some may see as unoriginal, I see as tributary. A lawless country split socially in half, poverty on one side, excess on the other, the world Johnson has manufactured carries an air similar to that of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, a comparably important sci-fi film in the struggle to build the credibility of the genre in the realm of modern cinema.
Not only is the film intelligent, it also acts as a courier for Johnson, a director of hit (Brick) and miss (The Brothers Bloom) repute following his sophomore outing.
If you support intelligent science fiction in the intellectual vein of Inception and Primer, Looper is a film sitting firmly in the middle of the two. Break the box office with this film and bring intelligence back to film-making.