Looper

Finally an intelligent, thought provoking Sci-fi movie along the same lines as The Adjustment Bureau (2011) and Source Code (2011). A time travel brain teaser set in a dark dystopian near future world that looks like a mix of Blade Runner (1982) and 12 Monkeys (1995), which also starred Bruce Willis. 

Gun totting assassins called ‘Loopers’ are well paid to kill people sent back in time from 30 years in the future by a criminal syndicate who need to dispose of people without leaving a trace.  An unusual fate awaits these hit-men once they have outlived their usefulness. Their future self will get sent back in time to be killed by their younger self in the past; this is called closing the loop. They then have only 30 years to live out the remainder of their life.

In the time honored time travel tradition of Back to the Future (1985), Looper plays on the connection of how the past shapes our future, but with an interesting twist. Taking the premise from the fascinating Michael Apted documentary The 7Up Series (1964 - 2012), which asserts that our personalities are already set by events that shape our lives at age seven, Looper uses this intriguing idea surrounding a mysterious six year old boy who is born with a special ability that he uses in his later adult life for evil purposes.

A young looper, Joe, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, recently seen in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), 50/50 (2011) and Inception (2010), living a life of excess with the loads of money he makes from the mob, is addicted to drugs and prostitutes, to take the edge off all the killing. Eventually he realizes that in order to prevent his future from coming back to haunt him, he must stop the vicious cycle in the present.

This is a Sci-Fi film that looks more like a futuristic action gangster film and will appeal to people who are not necessarily into Science Fiction but enjoy a suspenseful action thriller. There’s a bleak apocalyptic feel to it as the future looks more like a nightmare. Clearly our selfish obsession with money and consumerism will continue to have a devastating impact on our future population and world as it does today.

When a new crime boss called ‘The Rainmaker’ decides to close the loop on all the loopers in the future by sending them back in time to be executed, Joe is forced to kill his future self and lives out the rest of his thirty year life. But when they finally come for him and murder his wife, he uses the time machine to travel back to his younger self with the intention of changing a few things. Believing that his future wife can be saved if he eliminates The Rainmaker, who is taking over the crime syndicates, he plans to find him in the past where he is still only a six year old boy. 

What if we could go back in time and eliminate the young Hitler before he formed all his hateful ideas and influenced so many people to follow him, thus sparing history the Second World War. Knowing what we know of the past we would not hesitate to kill him, sparing the lives of millions of people. But what if the young boy Hitler was only 6 years old and could not be killed? At this age, according to the Jesuit motto; ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man’, all it would take to change the future is the love and influence of a caring adult.

As young Joe and old Joe meet, they battle each other over the boy’s destiny and that of their own. 

JP