A few steps into the future time travel will be invented and quickly outlawed. Only organized crime will have access to the technology. In the future it is near impossible to get away with murder, so the only way to successfully kill someone is to send them back in time before tracking software was invented and have them killed then. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe one of these specialized assassins called ‘loopers’. Masked victims are are transported back to be shot and disposed. Loopers are so named because eventually the mob will close the loop by sending them back to be murdered by their younger self. When Joe’s older self played by Bruce Willis comes back and escapes, both incarnations of Joe are forced to go on the run from one another. Desperate to change the past to prevent the death of his wife in the future, Old Joe sets out to murder a child who will grow up to become the ‘Rainmaker’, a ruthless criminal mastermind.
Looper was not what I expected. After seeing the trailer and hearing the concept I thought it was going to be a cat and mouse thriller. I expected the quirk to be Joe trying to outsmart an older and smarter version of himself. Although that was a part of the film the scope is much greater. As any good time travel movie should, free will and determinism are at played with. The unspoken question asked is what makes a good person good? Joe, although a protagonist, is a pretty awful human being. He is a drug addict, hired killer, willing to sell out his best friend. He sees his older self and the conclusion that his path leads too. When he meets his older self he is forced to confront his choices in life. Even then he only starts to realize who and what he is when meets the boy Old Joe is attempting to kill.
Time travel has a lot of potential for storytelling. Looper’s strength is that it invents a version of time travel without getting ahead of itself and builds a world around it. e. The future isn’t too distant and straddles the line between a modern society and a Minority Report styled society. older cars are retrofitted with tubes, wires and solar panels. Human beings have discovered telekinetic abilities.There are hover motorcycles, and holographic screens, existing side by side with impoverished slums. This grim take on future history is what one might expect to see in a world where organized crime controls something as powerful as time travel. The setting fits the conflict between the mob, old Joe, and young Joe like a glove.
Looper is a stand out time travel story. It is a unique sci fi story. Time travel isn’t the cornerstone of the film. The characters are.
On a Scale of 1 to Epic (Epic = 10): 
Looper gets a 8.9
