Friday 19 October 2012

Looper the movie

This is going to be a negative review.
I normally love time travel films, the paradoxoi that they generate are meat and drink to me. Millenium (director Michael Anderson) from 1989 with Kris Kristofferson, Cheryl Lad and Daniel Travanti was an intelligent closely plotted examination of all the space/time perturbations and timequakes that can happen with unwonted interchange. It's worth having a look at

Millenium complete

12 Monkeys (director Terry Gilliam) starring Bruce Willis, Madelaine Stowe, Christopher Plummer and David Morse was an excellent film also with its own attention to paradox. How do you change the past to alter the future, the very future from which you operate? Millenium recognises this in all its complexity but 12 Monkeys has Bruce Willis contemporaneous with his younger self. Can that be a good thing? It's a great picture.

Loopers is a mess designed like most films from Hollywood at the moment for boys between 15 and 22. The women in it are either whores or a madonna with a potty mouth. That goes with the demographic. Noisy, stupid, confused. Bruce Willis is implicated alas and Gordon-Levitt with curious make-up and an incipient smirk like Bruce the Younger. Not possible without reconstructive surgery.

Not a timequake, more of s fart in a biscuit tin.



6 comments:

ktismatics said...

Hiring Bruce Willis was surely a hat tip to the Twelve Monkeys. The first 30 seconds of voice-over explained the premise as far as ever it would be: these contract killers couldn't have cared less about the science, as long as they got their silver. I liked the noiresque dialogue and the Kansas farmland execution tableaux. The time machine looked like it had been transported forward from the 1890s.

ombhurbhuva said...

It had that H.G. Wells pod look to it. There is a film called 'Primer' which I haven't seen which is well thought off. In general though a single absurdity is quite enough, multiply them and interest vapourises.

ktismatics said...

I watched Primer tonight, and it's even loopier than Looper, to the point of near incoherence. But it's still a lot of fun watching and listening to a these young nerds in shirts and ties building mysterious machines in the garage during their spare time.

ombhurbhuva said...

A man can’t start too soon having a shed to putter in, to build time machines. It prepares him for the inevitable taunt:
Try fixing the tumble drier. That would be more in your line. Ask Nikola Tesla why don't ya.

I’d like to watch Primer but my wireless connection is unstable. They tell me it’s due to trees in the path but where do the trees go at 5A.M. when it is much better? The satellite option is expensive and really I’m already wasting too much time.

ktismatics said...

I'd send you the DVD but the library wants it back on Thursday. "It's not a Tesla coil," one of the characters corrects another while discussing one of the component in the device.

ombhurbhuva said...

Thanks John. That’s an excellent library service. I’d assumed you had got it on Netflix or something.
Tesla would come into it of course, massive amounts of free energywould be required to use worm holes to breach the etheric envelope. I am glad to report that the Irish are not behindhand in the development of such sources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn