Looper (2012) Rian Johnson and a time travelling tale from the future
“This time travel crap, just fries your brain like an egg”
In a long ago September in the year 2012, director Rian Johnson (Brick 2005, Star Wars: The Last Jedi 2017, Glass Onion 2022) summed up his third and latest movie Looper in a Time magazine interview as part Children of Men, “a little of Blade Runner” and whilst admitting the second half of the film owes a debt to films such as Witness and Shane he was also at pains to point out that this isn’t a purely a time travel saga and more a film about “the power of a parent’s love”. Reuniting with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the star of his debut film Brick in 2005, is portrayed in the interview as seamlessly as it was to persuade Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt to embrace his time travelling tale of assassins led by the ever dependable screen presence of Jeff Daniels, but your real star of the show is the cast’s youngest member Pierce Gagnon. He may only be in a handful of scenes in the latter half of the film but a decade or so ago and during my recent rewatch, his performance from one so young is utterly spellbinding.
Quoting from the interview for a final time:
“Looking back I’m kind of terrified that I hinged the success of the backend of the movie on finding someone like Pierce. It’s really rare to find a kid who can do what he does. He would do three-page dialogue scenes with Emily and Joe and hold his own against them all the way through”.
Looper mightily impressed me a decade ago, Pierce Gagnon’s performance still blows his highly accomplished co-stars off the screen, and here is my brief dissection of the opening 9 minutes:
From brief white on black opening credits we cut to the first of many close-ups in the coming film and the ticking of an old school pocket watch in the hands of “Joe” (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) practising his French language skills as he waits for his time appointed time traveller to arrive from the future on a white sheet beside a remote wheat field. Yes, we have an assassin practising his French whilst checking the time on his pocket watch and waiting for his first appointed kill of the day, but stay with me here! As director Rian Johnson moves his camera slowly around and slightly behind Joe, he switches off his translational aid and aiming his blunderbuss at the white sheeted area, shoots the time traveller dead the very second he appears before walking to the sheet and dropping his blunderbuss on the sheet and inspecting the body. Following a brief white and black title slide of “LOOPER” the film’s opening narration begins:
“Time travel has not yet been invented. But thirty years from now, it will have been”
We cut to Joe cutting open the clothing on the back of the recently killed time traveller.
“It will be instantly outlawed. Used only in secret by the largest criminal organisations”
Now with the clothing ripped open we see a host of silver bars concealed within the shroud surrounding the body as we quickly cut to a beautiful sunrise against a vibrant red sky and “KANSAS 2044” and now a brighter early morning, a truck speeding along a one track dusty road and as Joe unloads the largely wrapped dead body from the back of his truck, the narration continues:
“It’s nearly impossible to dispose of a body in the future I’m told, with tagging techniques and whatnot. So when these criminal organisations of the future need a body gone, they use specialised assassins in our present called loopers. And so, my employers in the future nab the target, they zap ’em back to me, their looper, he appears, hands tied and head sacked, and I do the necessaries. Collect my silver. So the target is vanished from the future and I’ve just disposed of a body that technically doesn’t exist. Clean”
We cut to Joe dumping the body into the funnel of a furnace burning below and quickly to a roadside diner as he practises his French pronunciation with French speaking waitress “Beatrix” (Tracie Thoms) who asks with a smile how his French is coming along. “Slowly” he responds before asking the smiling waitress about today’s coffee. “Burnt” she replies, but quickly Joe is speeding away and back to the city and our first sighting of a flying motorcycle as Joe enters what appears to be a music store but is anything but as he dumps his blunderbuss in a wall mounted holder before walking down a corridor and depositing two silver bars in a letterbox sized gap in an iron reinforced door, passing a fellow assassin on his way to collecting his blunderbuss, and back to his apartment for tea and more French language lessons. After a change of clothes and the uncovering of his sports car, Joe speeds through neighbourhood streets littered with highly impoverished citizens, one of whom steals a suitcase from a school bus stranded in the middle of the road before being gunned down as he makes a vain attempt at an escape. Warding off a potential thief of his motorcycle we are now introduced to “Seth” (Paul Dano) as Joe arrives to pick him up on the way to “La Belle” nightclub and with the top down on Joe’s sportscar, Seth demonstrates his telekinesis skills as despite Joe’s apathy, Seth announces “chicks dig the T K” as the narration returns:
“About 10% of the population has this T K mutation. When they first appeared, everyone thought we were gonna get superheroes. But it turns out this was it. Now it’s just a bunch of assholes who think they’re blowing your mind floating quarters”
We cut to Joe and Seth arriving at La Belle, a string of young ladies populate the curbside, some hoping to gain entry.
“It’s like this whole town. Big heads. Small potatoes”
Entering the club via a back door and somewhat VIP entry point, Joe is scanned to ensure he isn’t carrying a weapon before instantly bumping into “Suzie” (Piper Perabo) and asking if she’s working a shift tonight. Both Joe and Suzie are full of excited smiles for one another, however Joe’s smile drains away when Suzie confirms “I gotta work” and looking lost for the first time in the film, Joe is seemingly dragged away by an as yet unseen character and to the top of a flight of stairs with a gang of fellow assassins watching events below them.
“There’s a reason we’re called loopers. When we sign up for this job, taking out the future’s garbage, we also agree to a very specific proviso”
As the narration continues, we cut from the club at night to a graffiti lined industrial estate in daylight and the killing of yet another time traveller.
“Time travel in the future is so illegal, that when our employers want to close our contracts, they also want to erase any trace of their relationship with us ever existing. So, if we’re still alive 30 years from now, they’ll find our older self, zap ’em back to us, and we’ll kill him just like any other job. This is called closing your loop. And you’ll get a golden pay day, you get a handshake, and you get released from your contract”
During this continuing narration we’ve seen the assassin tear at the rear clothing of the instantly deceased and murdered man, but rather than a few silver bars there is instead a wealth of gold bars and fearing the removal of the hood covering the head and face of the man he’s just killed, we cut back to Joe watching this assassin on the stairs below him, his loop seemingly closed.
“Enjoy the next 30 years. This job doesn’t tend to attract the most forward thinking people”
“So are we celebrating?” the assassin exclaims, and celebrating is very much on the agenda for Joe and the gang of fellow assassins as we cut to an extreme close-up of his eyeball as he drops a currently unnamed and unexplained yellow liquid into his eye before the camera spins slowly around him twice as he walks joyously through the club. Next the camera shoots Joe driving his fellow assassins in his sportscar but framed upside down before an acid-like trip for all concerned in his speeding car ends with the near miss of a dirty faced young urchin holding a football in the middle of the street. The following morning we see the blood-shot eyes of Joe before in quick rotation the snapping of a piece of paper and his 11.30am assassin’s appointment with instant death, a brief continuance of his French language lessons, a quick high speed drive to to his assassination point beside the wheat field, the checking of his pocket watch, his blunderbuss at the ready for an instant killing, and another conversation at the roadside diner with Beatrix in French, more coffee, pocket watch in hand, blunderbuss at the ready, another killing, and back once more to La Belle in the evening before his looping, circle of life and death, recommences in the morning…
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon