Just Saw This: Looper

Looper | Rian Johnson | 2012 | USA, China  | Format: 35mm  | 118 min
  
Just saw this last night.
Highly recommend this stylish action thriller that deftly handles the themes of sacrifice and love.  The story is air-tight, the acting is believable and the cinematography is beautiful and well-paced without coming off pretentious.  Despite there being 1 or 2 scenes that I found a little over the top or even cheesy, I can't help but say that this was a very good movie.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt knows how to pick a good film to star in and produce.

Jim Emerson really enjoyed the details like the framing, movie references and, especially, the clouds.

   

I think my very favorite thing in Rian Johnson's "Looper" is a squiggly cloud. It hangs there in the sky above a cornfield and you can't help but notice it. Which is good, because this is a time-travel movie and the cloud comes in handy later when something happens again in this same spot and the cloud tells you what time it is. Thanks to that cloud, you know this is a re-run.

Omer Mozaffar touched on  the dystopian vision of movies set in the future.

In its background, we see that every utopian society must sanitize itself of its unwanted trash: human and waste. Think of the utopian mindset we create for ourselves when we take our unmentionables and move them out of sight, out of mind, consequently out of responsibility. 

Which reminds me of a thought I had while watching the movie, could this 3rd world wasteland be the future of the US?

Roger Ebert dug it too and enjoyed the romance.

Rian Johnson's "Looper," a smart and tricky sci-fi story, sidesteps the paradoxes of time travel by embracing them. Most time travel movies run into trouble in the final scenes, when impossibilities pile up one upon another. This film leads to a startling conclusion that wipes out the story's paradoxes so neatly it's as if it never happened. You have to grin at the ingenuity of Johnson's screenplay.

...The story gains depth with the introduction of romance. In most thrillers, female characters tend toward eye candy and are extraneous to the plot. Not here. Young Joe meets Sara (Emily Blunt), a fiercely independent woman who lives on a Kansas farm with her son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon). Although Young Joe has literally come from nowhere, they slowly grow close. In the future, we learn, Old Joe was married, and his wife (Summer Qing) was murdered by a figure known as The Rainmaker.

R. Kurt Osenlund thinks Looper is a contender for alot of technical Oscars.

Does Looper have a prayer in the Visual Effects race, where tigers and hobbits and Avengers will be sprinting, neck-in-neck? Before the film's release, the answer would have likely been a resounding “no,” as the throwback panache of Rian Johnson's aesthetic isn't even trying to compete with all the 3D bells and whistles of the spectacles above. But with a rapturous response from critics (RT score 94 percent and holding), Looper has the buzz and support to step into some serious contention, if not in the major races, then in tech areas that previously seemed beyond its reach. That is by no means to say the movie's tricks are not impressive. A near faultlessly calibrated slice of futurama (err, future drama), Looper is 2012's action flick to beat in terms of quality, and its old-school restraint has a contrasting lure that might make it a viable slot-filler (think the annual foreign trend in the Animation category).

The sound categories could potentially be easy gets for Looper, with the Sound Mixing and Sound Editing teams of Jeremy Peirson and company reaping recognition for their crisp and kick-ass aural effects (move over pulse rifle, the blunderbuss has arrived). Often in the film, the boom-boom-pow of the sound is matched by the rhythmic verve of the Editing, which is best highlighted in the film's fascinating montages, like Young Joe's (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) cornfield-to-nightclub daily grind, and Old Joe's (Bruce Willis) domestic evolution on the far side of the world. But an editing nod is next to impossible with the snowball-in-hell chance of Best Picture love. And though James Gelarden's Art Direction evokes a certain Ridley Scott metropolis, it's small potatoes when pitted against the Masters and Anna Kareninas of the season.

And a crucial nomination...

Sony should campaign hard for a Makeup nomination, as it's the one that Looper has the strongest shot at landing. Gordon-Levitt's semi-surreal makeover may not initially read "Willis," but as the characters spend more time together, and the dual roles are juxtaposed, the trickery of the makeup artists gains impressiveness, and that says nothing of the dimension added to Gordon-Levitt's performance.