If you saw “Looper” this past weekend, you’re probably still thinking about it. Rian Johnson’s surprisingly dense dystopic time-travel movie is, like “The Master,” one of those movies that just engenders conversation. Johnson so thoroughly thought out the paradoxical weirdness of time travel along with the grubby, dysfunctional world of middle America in 2044 that the movie not only holds up with multiple viewers, it gets richer.
The movie is about Joe, an assassin — or looper — living in the near future. His job is to whack mob victims sent illicitly back in time. The gig might not be the most demanding, but it pays well. Joe has enough money for a sweet vintage Miata, a vault filled with silver bars, and enough drugs to keep him flying high every night. Meanwhile, citizens not involved with some form of organized crime live either in soulless tenements or out on the street. It’s the sort of blandly grim future that makes “Blade Runner” look like a utopia. No flying cars or sexy androids here. When Joe is confronted with the task of killing the middle-aged version of himself, he chokes. The older Joe (Bruce Willis) cold-cocks him and flees. While Joe the younger desperately searches for his lost target, the older one has a brutally simple plan to return back to the good life he had taken from him. Continue reading ‘‘Looper’ Director Rian Johnson talks about time travel, Bruce Willis, and nostalgia’
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