So, I saw Looper last night.
Oct. 2nd, 2012 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eleanorjaneAnd I almost entirely agree with Abigail Nussbaum's review - be warned that it's spoilery, though. (One area where I disagree: I didn't find the prosthetics on JGL particularly distracting, though I agree with Nussbaum that JGL did a fantastic Young Bruce Willis impersonation.)
To be fair, the universal praise for Looper rather pumped up expectations, but I thought it was an interesting but very flawed film.
To start with, the central premise is absolutely ridiculous: that Loopers are required as specialised temporal assassins (with no actual skill or finess required, mind you). We're told that it's so hard to murder people in the future that they have to be sent back into the past to be killed and disposed of there, which leaves huge opportunities for things to go wrong and for Looper targets to flee (which they do not once but twice in the span of the movie alone). Why not murder them in the future and then just dispose of the bodies in the past? (Surely if everyone's tracked and tagged, having their life signs disappear in an abandoned construction site in China would simply draw the authorities to the building, thus revealing the illegal time machine.) For that matter, since the time machine moves the victims in space as well as time, why not just time-machine them into a 2044-era active volcano or the Mariana Trench and eliminate the need for the Looper middlemen? (Who are apparently such a risk that they all have to be killed off eventually anyway.) And you'd save all that silver and gold, to boot. And hell, the future gatmen murder Old Joe's wife without any hesitation anyway, so if she's killable, why not everyone else?
So that really affected my enjoyment of the movie - the central premise is nonsensical, which I hadn't expected to find in a movie being praised so highly by pretty much everybody.
Also, I was unsurprised but disappointed by the female roles in the film. There are three women; one of them never actually speaks (Old Joe's wife), one of them is the stereotypical Hooker With A Heart Of Gold, and the third is an important character but only in the context of her role as the mother of a future (possible) monster, not as a person in her own right. That said, it's nice to have characters for whom it's not all about the Daddy Issues for a change.
I did like the subtle references that permeate the film; there were lots of clever touches that don't beat you over the head. For example, in the diner when Old Joe is telling Young Joe about the Rainmaker, he mentions a couple of the stories circulating about the Rainmaker - that his mother was killed in front of him; that he doesn't have a lower jaw; etc. If Young Joe hadn't stopped Old Joe - i.e. in the sepia-toned potential future Young Joe saw played out in front of him - then Cid aka the Rainmaker would have hopped on that train minus one mother, and he had *just been shot in the jaw*. On a farm, where Sara had previously told Young Joe that wounds get infected easily. It's easy to imagine that Cid's wound would have festered and disfigured or destroyed his jaw, further alienating him from the rest of humanity and making it easier and easier for him to become the Rainmaker.
TL;DR - some of the details were clever, and I thought JGL did a fantastic job as a younger version of Bruce Willis, but I really don't see what the critics were raving about.
To be fair, the universal praise for Looper rather pumped up expectations, but I thought it was an interesting but very flawed film.
To start with, the central premise is absolutely ridiculous: that Loopers are required as specialised temporal assassins (with no actual skill or finess required, mind you). We're told that it's so hard to murder people in the future that they have to be sent back into the past to be killed and disposed of there, which leaves huge opportunities for things to go wrong and for Looper targets to flee (which they do not once but twice in the span of the movie alone). Why not murder them in the future and then just dispose of the bodies in the past? (Surely if everyone's tracked and tagged, having their life signs disappear in an abandoned construction site in China would simply draw the authorities to the building, thus revealing the illegal time machine.) For that matter, since the time machine moves the victims in space as well as time, why not just time-machine them into a 2044-era active volcano or the Mariana Trench and eliminate the need for the Looper middlemen? (Who are apparently such a risk that they all have to be killed off eventually anyway.) And you'd save all that silver and gold, to boot. And hell, the future gatmen murder Old Joe's wife without any hesitation anyway, so if she's killable, why not everyone else?
So that really affected my enjoyment of the movie - the central premise is nonsensical, which I hadn't expected to find in a movie being praised so highly by pretty much everybody.
Also, I was unsurprised but disappointed by the female roles in the film. There are three women; one of them never actually speaks (Old Joe's wife), one of them is the stereotypical Hooker With A Heart Of Gold, and the third is an important character but only in the context of her role as the mother of a future (possible) monster, not as a person in her own right. That said, it's nice to have characters for whom it's not all about the Daddy Issues for a change.
I did like the subtle references that permeate the film; there were lots of clever touches that don't beat you over the head. For example, in the diner when Old Joe is telling Young Joe about the Rainmaker, he mentions a couple of the stories circulating about the Rainmaker - that his mother was killed in front of him; that he doesn't have a lower jaw; etc. If Young Joe hadn't stopped Old Joe - i.e. in the sepia-toned potential future Young Joe saw played out in front of him - then Cid aka the Rainmaker would have hopped on that train minus one mother, and he had *just been shot in the jaw*. On a farm, where Sara had previously told Young Joe that wounds get infected easily. It's easy to imagine that Cid's wound would have festered and disfigured or destroyed his jaw, further alienating him from the rest of humanity and making it easier and easier for him to become the Rainmaker.
TL;DR - some of the details were clever, and I thought JGL did a fantastic job as a younger version of Bruce Willis, but I really don't see what the critics were raving about.