Time travel really messes with your mind, doesn’t it? I mean, The Grandfather-paradox, Back to the Future, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure: it just fucks with your idea of time. Like: what is it? Is it a steady stream, from the roiling past through this very present moment right here and now into the bright and dapper future, and are we just along for the ride? Or could we, perhaps, with enough knowledge and technology, travel through it, and, you know, fuck things up? Like: even more?
I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. As an actor, I mean. Like Brad Pitt, I don’t know him personally, but judging by what I’ve seen of him in various movies over the years, he seems to be this fairly relaxed and likeable person, with a great smile. I’m not gay (I think) but if I was, I’d love to make out with him. I don’t like his name, though. It’s way too long and complicated, so from now on I’m just going to call him ‘Jo’.
In this particular movie, Jo plays a so-called ‘Looper‘, an assassin in the somewhat distant future, where time travel has been invented, was immediately outlawed by everyone, so now only great big drug empires use it illegally to dispatch those they want, you know… dispatched.
The way it works is this: in the future, bad guys stuff some unlucky fucker in their time machine, which is, rather refreshingly, an old rusty metal sphere, just big enough for one person, instead of some flashy Hollywoody-looking piece of machinery, no: this one is hidden in some abandoned industrial facility (you Americans seem to have a lot of those… You are so lucky, with all that space you have over there…), then they appear in the past, or the now, from our point of view, in some remote hay field, where the Looper awaits him with his blunderbuss. Yes, that’s a thing.
So, now, because our near-future is always filthy and fucked up in these types of movies, (I wonder why…) somehow nearly ten percent of the population is starting to display mutations that allowed them to float coins and shit, with their hands. Then, somewhere, somehow, some super powerful mutant turns up, kills all competing bad guys and takes over, you know… everything. Drugs, and shit. And closes all the Loops. You know, those assassins from the past? No? Me neither, man.
I read somewhere that Jo really tried hard to play the younger Bruce, so he watched old movies of him, and practiced until he got all those specific smirks and facial tricks under his belt that, with some kind help of the make-up department, makes you think: ‘damn! He really nailed that shit!’ Even Bruce himself seemed to have said somewhere that when they played the scenes in which they appeared together, he really saw a younger version of himself. Now, that is a great compliment, whether it is true, or not. The problem is: he really does. So I got really distracted by my obnoxious brain that kept saying: ‘look! He is doing that particular look from Bruce, you know? And now, hear this: he is talking just like him!’ But maybe that’s just me.
This is a good movie, though. At least, I think it is. If that means anything to you, dear reader. Who knows, you might be in the future, also, right now. Just imagine, that that silly Goat-person in that distant past decided to ‘put this piece up’, as it was called, back then, and that then The Singularity happened, you know, where all technology and consciousness and universes just merge into this and that you are out there, dear probably multidimensional and very unfathomable being, absorbing this into your system, right now, somehow, and that, therefore, everything everywhere becomes aware of itself, all at the same time, so that, you know…
I don’t know. I liked it.