I spent the first 5 minutes of Looper wondering if Joseph Gordon-Levitt had a brother. Why? For this movie, they altered him with makeup (three hours’ worth, I hear) to make him look more like Bruce Willis, as he plays his younger version. And what a fantastic job they did. I actually had to imdb the movie after it started to make sure it was him. I spent time trying to find flaws with it and found none. He is painstakingly made to look like he is not wearing makeup. He also worked hard to reflect some of Bruce’s mannerisms and facial expressions – very believable. So kudos to the makeup and prosthetics team – you knocked it out of the park and I want to see more makeup jobs like this. And kudos to Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Now, the movie.
It’s great! The action scenes are well-made and there is some humor laced into the script, which I love. The plot and premise of the movie is original and entertaining. It’s definitely worth a rewatch or two to find symbolism in the various scenes. The sci-fi aspects of the movie were well thought out and significantly less boring than the recent trash that has come out and pretended to be good sci-fi. (Total Recall and Prometheus, to name a few) I don’t really have complaints about any of the actors or really anything. It was just plain good. I’d advise at least renting it.
There are some potential flaws to the time travel aspects of the movie if you think about them too much. However, time travel is theoretical, so the director decided on his own way of doing things, which I respected and enjoyed. He also put a scene in the middle that I think speaks directly to the viewer, where Bruce Willis tells his past self to stop worrying and thinking so much about the future and live in the moment. If you as an audience member live in the moment, you will thoroughly enjoy yourself. ;)
I actually thought this was a fantastic movie as well, I was hoping for nothing when it was over except to see the RainMaker blow up more stuff, but it all came together really well and ended even better. Bruce is one of my favorite actors and Levitt is creeping up there slowly yet surely. I thought the time travel was pretty clear in the movie, i’ll talk to you later about the flaws you found. Good post!
Ooh I would totally love to chat about it. :)
SPOILER ALERT*** I’ll touch on it a bit here. I’ll call the MC Bruce for simplicity. lol
The main time travel paradox stems from the fact that if young Bruce kills himself, Old Bruce would no longer exist, which was the case..however, if Old Bruce no longer existed, he never would have come back in time to encounter young Bruce and cause the whole stream of events to occur.
The director instead alters the concept of time travel so that paradox would not occur – Old Bruce and young Bruce are dead but the timeline of the story continues from that point on as normal (i.e the woman and the Rainmaker still have a memory of Young Bruce existing at all, when in fact, since Young Bruce killed himself and Old Bruce, Old Bruce would not have affected Young Bruce’s life and hence he would never have had a reason to go see them.) It’s not really flawed…just a different way of looking at causality.
My husband maintains that the movie would have been better if, when he shoots himself and Old Bruce disappears, we zoom in on Young Bruce’s face as he dies…zoom in…zoom in..and then we zoom out and we’re back at the beginning, where he is waiting to assassinate his next target (who is supposed to be himself)…and no one ever shows up. Or he waits a few seconds and the movie ends. Something like that. xD