Taglines: Hunted by your future. Haunted by your past.
In the year 2047 time travel has yet to be invented. Thirty years later, however, it has. Though immediately outlawed, time-travel technology is quickly appropriated by the mob, and used to cleanly dispose of anyone deemed a threat. The process is simple: When the mob wants someone to disappear, they simply send them back to the year 2047, where an assassin known as a “looper” quickly carries out the hit, and disposes of the body. Joe Simmons (Gordon-Levitt) is one of the most respected Loopers around. Each kill earns him a big payday, and he’s got big plans to retire to France.
Then, one day, as Joe patiently awaits the appearance of his next target near the edge of a remote corn field, he’s shocked to come face-to-face with his future self (Bruce Willis). When the younger Joe hesitates, the older Joe makes a daring escape. Now, in order to avoid the wrath of his underworld boss (Jeff Daniels), young Joe must “close the loop” and kill his older counterpart. Meanwhile, the revelation that a powerful crime boss in the future has set the underworld ablaze pits the two Joes on a violent collision course, with the fate of a devoted mother (Emily Blunt) and her young son hanging in the balance.
Looper is a 2012 American science fiction thriller film written and directed by Rian Johnson, and produced by Ram Bergman and James D. Stern. It stars Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Emily Blunt. It revolves around “present-day” contract killers called “loopers” hired by criminal syndicates from the future to terminate victims that they send back through time. Looper was selected as the opening film of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and was released in the United States on September 28, 2012.[5][6] The film grossed $176 million on a $30 million budget, while receiving critical acclaim.
Looper is a 2012 American science fiction thriller film written and directed by Rian Johnson, and produced by Ram Bergman and James D. Stern. It stars Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Emily Blunt. It revolves around “present-day” contract killers called “loopers” hired by criminal syndicates from the future to terminate victims that they send back through time. Looper was selected as the opening film of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and was released in the United States on September 28, 2012.[5][6] The film grossed $176 million on a $30 million budget, while receiving critical acclaim.
Looper opened on September 28, 2012, in 2,992 theaters in North America and grossed US$20,801,522 in its opening weekend averaging US$6,952 per theater and ranking #2 at the box office. The widest release of the film in the U.S was 2,993 theaters and it ended up earning US$66.5 million domestically and US$110 million internationally for a total of US$176.5 million, against its US$30 million production budget.
Film Review for Looper
Rian Johnson’s Looper is very exciting and very confusing at the same time: a gripping time-travel, sci-fi thriller indebted to Christopher Nolan’s Memento and James Cameron’s The Terminator, but with its own creepiness and muscular sense of urgency. Bewilderingly, the film is set in the future, in 2044, and also 30 years further ahead than that.
In 2074, time travel is invented, and at once made illegal by a nervous government; at the same time, surveillance technology and CSI-style forensic skills make killing people very difficult, so crime syndicates get hold of a samizdat time-travel device and use this to “remove” troublesome people. Victims are whooshed back in time 30 years where lowly paid assassins blast them with shotguns and get paid in silver bars strapped to the victim’s body. But there’s a catch. The killers are known as “loopers”, because one day they must close the loop.
Their future middle-aged selves must be liquidated, because they have amassed too much information about their employer, so are sent back in time for assassination with the special retirement payoff of gold bars strapped on. The younger self must then pull the trigger, and accept, with as much zen calm as possible, his disappearance in 30 years. One of these loopers is Joe, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (above) – but when his older self, played by Bruce Willis, comes back, he somehow evades the execution and Joe has to hunt himself down.
As with all time-travel movies, there is an awkward moment when one character asks plaintively about the logical impossibilities inherent in what’s happening and another character tells him to just shut up and forget about it. Of course, there is no sense in the time travel in Looper, but no less sense than in any other film in this genre.
Johnson makes up for it with narrative force, mesmeric fascination and a sense of a profound taboo being broken. Gordon-Levitt is made up oddly – to look like Willis’s younger self, of course, but this has an uncanny effect, adding to the mutant strangeness that pervades the movie. It’s different from the comedy in Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985) and the deadpan science in Shane Carruth’s cult indie Primer (2004).
There is violence and fear: criminals have corrupted the very tenets of space and time. Jeff Daniels has a funny cameo as Abe, the gang boss who has to make excursions back in time to check this side of the operation is running smoothly. He is contemptuous of Joe taking French lessons and tells him to learn Mandarin because China is going to be all-important. (“I’m from the future; I know.”) I left Looper dizzy with excitement, and also just dizzy.
Looper (2012)
Directed by: Rian Johnson
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Noah Segan, Piper Perabo, Jeff Daniels, Pierce Gagnon, Tracie Thoms, Frank Brennan, Garret Dillahunt, Marcus Hester
Screenplay by: Rian Johnson
Production Design by: Ed Verreaux
Cinematography by: Steve Yedlin
Film Editing by: Bob Ducsay
Costume Design by: Sharen Davis
Set Decoration by: Kate Sullivan
Art Direction by: James A. Gelarden, Scott Plauche
Music by: Nathan Johnson
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language, some sexuality/nudity and drug content.
Distributed by: Sony TriStar Pictures
Release Date: September 28, 2012
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