Looper

Looper

Written and Directed by Rain Johnson

118 minutes, 2012

If you saw “Looper” ask yourself what do you remember about it?  Honestly, what is the singular lasting image in your memory from this film? 

One thing I look for in a good movie is narrative quality.   Are story events presented in some kind of organic and coherent fashion?  Or does the story patched together or held captive to some other agenda?

The only thing that seemed to matter to writer/director Rain Johnson was that he was making a drama set in a near future dystopia that featured as many people as possible being shot to death.  The body count by graphic person-to-person, gunshot was enormous, gross, and unnecessary.  The narrative was held hostage by a desire to show as many people being shot to death as possible justified by time travel.  There were no moral or narrative consequences to killing anyone.  Like they really weren’t dying because they were still alive in the future, or the past, or something like that.

The story was patched together by extensive voice over and on-screen titles.  Even these cheap, dumb-down tricks could not overcome the confusing and plodding storyline.  

Why do so many people like to watch people killing each other with a gun on a movie screen but then get upset when they see on TV news that someone went to work and shot five co-workers?  Or sadly, do those people who like watching gun violence on the movie screen give a shit that their neighbor, or a stranger, was shot to death by a handgun or an assault rifle?

The possibility of death creates drama.  Graphic murder, killing people for the sake of killing people with no dramatic purpose demonstrates an intellectual and artistic failure.  For the people who enjoy watching it, it represents a failure of thoughtful analysis and succumbing to a primitive need to witness violence.  You’re being played by the film industry and you don’t even know it.

Perhaps during development and making of the movie Rain Johnson and the producers realized it was truly a weak story that wouldn’t sustain interest or make any money, so they added as much killing as possible.  I think a better explanation is that they wanted to do this from the beginning and just couched it in science fiction, time travel terms.  Either way, “Looper” is a failure. 

There is a place for death and violence in story telling.  We should all think twice however about supporting and accepting films that demean and devalue human life in such overwhelming terms as the case is for “Looper”. 

If you went to this movie, ask yourself what do you remember about it?  What are the lasting images in your memory from this film?  You will probably answer ‘people being shot to death'.