Matthew Riashi ’13 | Sports Editor

“Looper” is not what you think it is.

This movie is not just about Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) chasing down Old Joe (Bruce Willis) and trying to kill him. There are not as many action scenes as you would think either. The main story line is about revenge and decisions you make and how they affect the future.

To understand “Looper” further, you need to know that it takes place in two futures. The majority of the movie takes place in 2044 with many short segments between then and 2074. In the future, they have invented time travel and it is controlled by the mob. What the mob does is they send people back to 2044 and have them killed there, so they basically disappear from the future.  Young Joe is a part of the Looper system and he kills the people the mob feels are a threat in the future. A loop is the general explanation on time travel in the movie, and how things are looped together.

The main conflict in the movie is that the mob is taken over by the radical being that starts closing the Loops. Closing a Loop means they send back your future self to kill unknowingly and from that point on you have 30 more years to live.

The crucial scene in “Looper” is when Old Joe (Bruce Willis) shows up on the white mat for Young Joe to kill. Usually they appeared masked, but Old Joe was unmasked. Young Joe realizes that the man in front of him is his future self, hesitates, and Old Joe gets away.

When the Older Joe is in the year 2044, he is not just running away from Younger Joe, he is looking for the younger version of the man that is causing all the problems in the year 2074, the time he is from, so he can kill him and stop him from doing what he is going to do in the future.

Time travel movies make you think, a lot. At the beginning when Young Joe meets Old Joe the movie takes you through one loop until you get back to where the present time in 2044 stopped. Those thirty years they flash through are somewhat critical to understand why Old Joe wants to get revenge on the future radical “boss.”

The movie does a good job of making Levitt look like a younger Bruce Willis. He may not look exactly like him, but there is a close enough resemblance in his face. Levitt also does a good job of picking up on Willis’ speech patterns and how Willis talks throughout the movie. While Levitt may not seem tough enough to play a young Bruce Willis type character, more details are explained on how he changes over time.

A couple of negatives of Looper are Jeff Daniels’ character and some of the plot holes in the movie. Daniels plays a time control “boss” in 2044, but is from 2074. In some scenes he would try to be funny and in another he was a serious boss. The two didn’t seem to mix well and he was a weaker link in the movie. There was a huge hole in the story, but further talking about it may ruin the movie.

Looper is about 2 hours long and it drags out a little bit. Other than that, it is a good movie, especially if you like action and Sci-Fi.

B+