Looper
It’s not often that I have time to sit down and watch a movie. But since my children aren’t sleeping and I have to regularly get up and return them to bed or pat them and make shushing noises, I’ve found myself with some time on my hands at very unusual hours.
As such, I finally got to see “Looper,” a film I’d been pretty excited to see when it was first released. What follows is a brief review that contains spoilers (in case you somehow took longer to see this movie than I did and still hope to see it, which would be surprising).
I’ll begin by saying that I enjoyed the film. I liked the style in which the story was told, I liked the way it looked, and I was just generally entertained by it (especially by the premise). Time travel is a fun idea to consider and making Joseph Gordon-Levitt look a little like Bruce Willis is interesting in itself. It’s noteworthy, too, that Gordon-Levitt keeps choosing roles in films like this one that encourage the viewer to scratch his head, wonder about the events that have just taken place on screen, and ask some questions. I generally think it’s better to finish a movie and have questions than to be told exactly what to think about it.
That said, I’m left with a fairly major question at the end of the film:
Did I just spend two hours watching a movie whose events never happened?
In other words, the narrative centers around Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis. The latter is a future version of the former. Willis returns to his past (Gordon-Levitt’s present) in order to find and kill a child who threatens him and his happiness in the future. However, Gordon-Levitt kills himself in his present time in order to prevent Willis from killing the child’s mother (which would lead to the child growing up to threaten Willis and, thus, a circle of killing and suffering). This causes Willis to simply wink out of existence.
If Gordon-Levitt has killed himself in his present time, then there is no future Gordon-Levitt (played by Willis), which means that Willis could not have traveled back in time to kill the child because he would not exist in the future. But that means that Gordon-Levitt has no need to kill himself because there is no Willis there in Gordon-Levitt’s present, trying to kill the child (and killing the mother in the process, thus creating the circle mentioned above).
So … the movie I watched is an impossibility.
Discuss ….