Now Looper

To get another movie out of the way, a couple of weeks back now I went to see Looper with some friends. If you've seen any trailer or poster or whatever you know it's about a guy that kills people from the future, and one day he has to kill himself, but blows it, and now has to find and kill himself.

Except... we get to that part of the movie, when the two first face off, and the world has only just begun to be explored and I realized "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN!" I was pretty excited. I had expected a chase film with a twist (that of chasing yourself) but it quickly became apparent that that was only a small part of what was happening.

What the movie is ACTUALLY about is the discovery of who the "Rainmaker" is, a nearly all powerful crime boss from the future that must be stopped before he can start "raining terror" or his "reign of terror". I think it was used both ways.

Early on in the film it looked like Joe (I think that was Joseph Gordon-Levitt's characters name... and therefore also the name for the character Bruce Willis plays..) Young Joe, rather, had died falling off a fire escape. The movie then flipped back to the moment when Old Joe gets transported to the past, and Young Joe has to kill him. I sat there plenty smug, because I was sure I was totally up on my time travel science fiction, and was therefore the only guy to get that the timeline reset, because without Young Joe, Old Joe couldn't be there, so Young Joe wouldn't have been in the position to fall off the fire escape and die. Paradox created, things would reset to avoid said paradox.

However, I was thinking much too hard. What we were actually seeing was the history of Old Joe- the timeline where he successfully killed his older self, and went on to enjoy his retirement in China until his cash ran out, he becomes a hired gun, he finds love, gets clean of the drugs in his system, and redirects all his selfish ways into love for his wife. Sounds sweet, don't it? Except he's so determined to save her life after the Rainmakers goons show up to send Old Joe to the past and end up shooting her in the process, that this determination (Termination? Terminator? Oh, I get it!) is what gets him to clock out his younger self and go find the mysterious Rainmaker as a little kid and kill him. Or her.

Seeing Old Joe kill a random kid (that, spoiler alert, he got the wrong one first), even though it devastates him, he never loses his resolve to do it again. And again. Whatever it takes to save his love in the future. HIS love. Young Joe even points this out in an awesome scene when the two are in a diner together. "Show me her picture, and I'll never marry her. Boom. Saved." (paraphrased obviously) Not that Young Joe cared about this hypothetical woman, he just wanted his old self to die and be done with everything. But still, kid had a point. Old Joe didn't want to sacrifice his time with this woman, maybe he was even counting on being snapped back to the future if he killed the kid that was in charge of sending Old Joe to the past (cause if he isn't sent, then, uh, he wasn't sent). Regardless, Old Joe is still as self involved and monstrous as Young Joe.

The other thing you won't have heard about this movie going in is that, according to the narration, about 10% of the population have acquired telekinesis. Not a lot, they can mostly move quarters around at parties (lot of dudes messing with quarters). Anyways, it's a plot point that was thrown out, then you forget about it until it comes back in a huge way.

I forget the full list of influences the writer-director cited, certainly 12 Monkeys (haven't seen), Terminator (seen 95% of it on tv), and also Akira. Oh, I've seen Akira.

That's the telekinesis influence. Definitely.

Awesome, awesome movie.