Back and forth

The time for looking back on the year is typically the last day of it, not the first day of the next but I have some unfinished business from 2012 I would like to document, namely the business of documenting it.  It’s mostly films but it does give me a pointer should I ever forget and want a more personal outlook than IMDb can provide.

Looper is the first I wish to chronicle.  I didn’t find the time to catch it in the standard multiplexes as the demands of my Master’s degree course took precedence but on the flip side I did watch it in the University of Canterbury’s specialist Gulbenkian Theatre.  I say specialist because I still remember the days when it doubled as a lecture theatre, when now it is configured purely for cinema use.   In all truth, I didn’t really have the time to watch it this time either, on a Monday night with an absolute deadline looming later that week, but I would say it was worth it (I merely crammed in an all-nighter a day or so later, not sleeping until the assignment was complete).

Looper is set roughly 30 years in the future and is set largely in Kansas and the flipping between realities harks back to that other great Kansas-originated motion picture, The Wizard of Oz.  Did I say ‘other great’?  Yes, because Looper is one of the best sci-fi films I have seen in a long time, ingenious and suspenseful.  Another benefit of setting it mostly in Kansas is a majority of people who see it can’t really gainsay that the countryside and Kansas City will not appear like this in 2044, whereas people could carp about something set in New York or Los Angeles, plus it gives a freshness as Robocop did when being set in rustbelt Detroit.  Kansas City looks like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan won two terms as president each, consecutively – grinding poverty interspersed with high-end wealth.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt goes from strength to strength in his career: Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and this – blockbusters that aren’t afraid to inject intelligence and theorising into their proceedings.  Bruce Willis continues his recent trajectory of appearing in decent films – most of the time (as Gordon-Levitt exits the G.I. Joe franchise, Willis enters it, when it is eventually released).  Emily Blunt gives a brilliant performance of a mid-Western single mum or ‘mom’, quite a departure from Queen Victoria.  Jeff Daniels gives a charismatic and ruthless display of a world-weary mobster middleman.

Rian Johnson writes and directs with great panache (editing could have been a bit better).  When the criminal gangs of the 2074 future want rid of someone, they send them back 30 years, hooded and thus incognito with silver (and occasionally gold) bars as payment.  Sometimes, they send back the future self of the hitman.  The hitman is supposed to only find out they killed themselves in the future once they open the package.  They then have completed their ‘loop’, get a golden goodbye from the mob and live the hedonistic lifestyle for as long as they have left or their cash lasts.  They can blame no-one but themselves for their death.  Woe betide the looper who lets his target escape, even it be his future self.  One particularly heart-stopping sequence has a man from the future who managed to persuade his looper not to kill him, gradually has bits disappear from him as his present self, having been captured by the mob, is dismembered.

Old Joe (Willis) has other ideas when his wife is killed by agents of The Rainmaker, an all-powerful crimelord who is never seen and so as always his malevolence is the greater in the truly dystopian world of 2074.  Amidst widespread destruction, The Rainmaker is waging a campaign of sending all the loopers back.  Old Joe escapes 2044 Joe and so Joe goes back to recover his silver bars that he had been hoarding behind the back of his underworld bosses (who incidentally are aware of it).  He dies.  Then Joe is back and he kills Old Joe without trouble, gets his golden goodbye and lives it up for 30 years and we see how Joe became Old Joe and gave up his selfish ways because of his wife.  Then after his wife’s death, Joe kills the assassins and sends himself back to confront his earlier self as he had originally done but with the knowledge to avoid what happened before.  As Jeff Daniels’ Abe says “Time travel fries your mind.”

Joe is saved by Old Joe but still wants to kill his older self because not only is he robbed of 30 years of living it up, both of them will be dispatched without compunction.  Old Joe is on a mission to save his wife – before he was sent back, he was told the date and place The Rainmaker was born and plans to destroy the monster while still a child.  A moral dilemma that cuts to the heart of Old Joe – and us – is that three children were born on that date in that hospital and so he has to murder two innocent children.

Present Joe finds the location of one and stakes out, waiting for his older self to arrive, there striking up an initially uneasy relationship with Sara and her Cid, a boy with a volcanic temper enough to make Sara lock herself in a massive safe/panic room.  Eventually present Joe realises that Cid becomes The Rainmaker but, with no wife he’s trying to protect, he can’t shoot Cid and Sara makes him believe that with her love, Cid need not turn out the way he becomes. 

After turning his capture into a Trojan Horse, slaughtering the entire mob headquarters with techniques gained over a lifetime, Old Joe comes after Cid and, in a cornfield, blasts away, catching Cid on the chin – The Rainmaker is alleged (nothing is certain) to have a synthetic jaw.  Sara catches up and manages to put herself between Old Joe and Cid, now in the cornfield itself.  Joe from a distance sees the whole situation armed only with an inaccurate blunderbuss.  He sees the whole catastrophe of the future repeating itself, with Old Joe reluctantly killing Sara to get to Cid for she blocks his path.  Joe became a young punk after hopping a train to escape abusive guardians and he can envisage Cid doing the same.  Thus Old Joe creates The Rainmaker when trying to rid the world of him to save Old Joe’s wife and The Rainmaker inadvertently tries to save Sara by killing all the loopers but by his action creates the setting for Sara dying.  Present Joe realises murdering to stop the deaths of others is counter-productive but with his poor weapon he can’t do anything, so he ends the bad future by doing a true selfless act, turning the weapon on himself before Old Joe can kill Sara.  From the silver bars Old Joe stole after killing everyone at mob headquarters, Sara can have a good life with Cid and, tellingly, after Sara warned about infection earlier, the film concludes with Sara having bandaged Cid’s cheek, rather than the potential future when Cid would have been by himself and left the wound to fester.  This is an indicator that the future has changed for the better.  This film left a deep impression on me in the hours and days ahead.