Most audiences loved the film, but I have one minor issue with it.
One of Rian Johnson’s best films and one of 2012’s best sci-fi flicks has gained a good reputation over the last 9 years with both audiences and film critics. However, despite all the great aspects of the film, I had one issue with the film.
With a rotten tomatoes score of 93%, most would struggle to find many negative things to say about Looper. It was a breath of fresh air in filmmaking terms, something that audiences had never seen before. Originally made into a short film, Rian Johnson spent years developing and expanding the project into a full length narrative with fleshed ideas and concepts.
This may be a case where the film’s concept is better than the actual execution. The film’s concept is smart, slick, and original, however, I did not care about any of the characters, and in fact, I think the film did not want us to and if this is the case, then fair enough. I will explore this in more detail later on, but for now, I would like to discuss the positive aspects of the film to which there are plenty.
Rian Johnson and casting director Craig Fincannon, have chosen an array of talent that all do a strong job of selling their characters. Emily Blunt, Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Paul Dano, and Jeff Daniels are working on a story that is unpredictable and involves to a large extent original world-building.
When we think about world-building, titans that come to mind are James Cameron, George Lucas, Michael Bay, Christopher Nolan, and more. Rian Johnson has excellently crafted a film with its own set of rules and language, which makes viewing it evermore exciting because you can really get immersed in this film because it’s so different and really going beyond what a lot of films do. Few have their own original universe.
The performances are fine-tuned to this concept, Gordon Levitt does a fine job of walking us through his job and explaining the basic rule settings of time travel. The film goes so fast that you don’t have time to catch up with the rationality of it all.
Upon countless rewatches of the film, the editing and cinematography are both infectious. The editing is most impressive, it’s stylized just at the point of cool but not ridiculous, unlike a Michael Bay or Zach Synder film. All of the technical elements of the film are almost flawless, including an interesting soundtrack by Nathan Johnson who is the brother of Rian.
The film looks amazing, with cinematographer Steve Yedlin working with Rain Johnson after Brick. He would later work with Rian on The Last Jedi and Knives Out.
The film is paced very well from start to finish, allowing the film to move fast and progress the narrative until its explosive climax, it provides a nice balance between exposition scenes and moments where we learn more about Gordon Levitt’s past, which is intertwined with Bruce Willi’s story and motives, but one huge piece is missing from is, which is the emotion.
It’s not like I didn’t like the characters in the film, in fact, I thought all of them were interesting in their own ways. Emily Blunt was a strong female lead, who is forced to make some hard choices in the film, never wanting to abandon her troubled son and certainly gives Gordon Levitt a good fight when he comes knocking at her door.
The only real moments of character development we get are the moments where Joseph Gordon Levitt is torn between two choices he has to make. Running away from his job and settling into a new environment, Bruce Willis has moments with his love interest who eventually gets taken away from him. The film deals with character conflict, but the emotional resonance was never as strong as I wanted it to be.
There is an element of tragedy in the film where the two characters are talking about their lives and how they’ve changed. Imagine talking to an older or a younger version of yourself in a diner, that would get quite intense and certainly interesting. You would probably spend hours just talking.
This is definitely the best Bruce Willis performance in a long time, he was perfectly cast and he came across as someone who had a lot of life experience and been through a lot, that’s a very hard act to play. The best scene is the diner scene, very well written dialogue between the two.
The film is intelligent, riddled with original ideas with fabulous themes, however, if I really cared about the characters, I wonder how much better the film would have been. It’s up there with some of cinema’s finest diner scenes including Pulp Fiction, Heat and more.
Going back to the point of the film lacking emotion, perhaps this film is made to be an observation of two complex lives of essentially one person, who’s time is spent flickering through the myths and wonderfully tragic yet complex nature of time travel in film and the reality it has over him. That’s probably the most relatable theme in the whole film, its the scenes between Willis and Levitt. Their scenes are rich in history and experience.
Although, time travel is complex, the film makes it fairly easy to follow, it’s only when you stop and think about it, the film may loose you. As I’ve said, the emotion never quite hit for me, I never deeply cared about anyone on screen but I was interested, deeply interested. Being interested and actually caring may be two different things.
Perhaps, if the film wanted to be more emotional it would have had to sacrifice or change the whole tone of the picture. For a film that is full of so many interesting ideas and themes, I really recommend watching Rian Johnson talk about it in interviews. Check it out below.
The interview above explains all of the film’s intentions really well, a great general summarization of whole picture in under 5 minutes. I would be interested in seeing a sequel, but that looks impossible considering Rian’s working on a new Knives Out sequel.
Whether you care about the characters or not, one thing is for sure is that you will get an action-packed ride with Looper. A film that will introduce new ideas and an original world.
Have you seen Looper?
Author Bio
Sam is a content writer. He loves all elements connected with film and writes with passion, always. You can find him on Linkedin, where you will be able to read more articles. When he is not writing, you can find him practicing football
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