'Round the Looper

time. Time, the final - or perhaps first - frontier to be breached by science. Time travel movies are often confusing and illogical, but Rian Johnson's Looper presents viewers with a coherent time-jumping story that includes two well-realized futures.

The main action of Looper takes place in 2044. An unnamed American city is awash in poverty and violence, and it seems as though only criminals enjoy a decent standard of living. Loopers are among the criminal elite, men who are paid to kill people from the future, victims of organized crime in the 2070s, sent thirty years backwards in time for elimination since bodies are too hard to hide in the future.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a Looper who dreams of escaping third-world America by relocating to France. But his plans are derailed when his own future self (Bruce Willis) appears as his own latest victim. Young Joe and Old Joe are forced to fight for their own versions of their lives, chasing each other while being chased by the mob bosses who want them both dead.

It sounds confusing, but Johnson takes pains to keep the chronology consistent and understandable, allowing the audience to enjoy the characters and the crumbling America they inhabit. One of the film's greatest strengths is its vision of the near future; the world looks much the same save for a few logical extrapolations of current technology. It's quite convincing.

Johnson handles a number of time travel tropes quite cleverly, particularly the problem of what happens to the future version of a character when something happens to the present version.

To elaborate further would spoil some rewarding surprises, so I'll conclude only by noting that with its clever plot, inventive setting and complex characters, Looper is well worth your