Rian Johnson's First Science Fiction Film Is Better Than The Last Jedi

Even before H.G. Wells popularized the idea of “time machines” in 1895, human beings have been using fiction to travel backwards and forwards through history. It’s a literary device used in everything from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to The Terminator to Avengers: Endgame, in part because time travel is a flavor that you can add to any number of storytelling dishes. It can be the backbone of lofty high-concept science fiction epics like the Star Trek reboot films or a casual intensifier for a romance film, or a horror movie, or a comedy.

Despite seeming like a polar opposite on the genre spectrum, film noir shares that elastic quality with time-travel fiction. Both can loom large over a narrative or drape over the proceedings almost imperceptibly, and both often serve as vehicles for explorations of human behavior in extreme circumstances. And, as Rian Johnson showcased to the world back in 2012, they’re two genres that work surprisingly well next to each other.

Rian Johnson is no stranger to postmodern riffs on the classic film noir, and much in the same way that his debut Brick calls attention to its “high school by way of Raymond Chandler” hijinks, Looper wears its two-toned noir heart on its sleeve. The shadowy gangster empires of the ‘40s have been replaced by a temporal loophole in which desperate criminals in Kansas City circa 2044 (just a few decades shy of the invention of time travel) are contracted by a crime syndicate 30 years in the future to execute and dispose of enemies sent backwards in time, a contract that only ends when the “looper” greets the future version of themselves with a bullet. The movie metatextually tips the hat to its influences with its hard-boiled production design and costuming (Abe, a crime boss from the future running the operation in the past, exclaims that “the movies you’re dressing like are just copying other movies”), but the purpose is deeper than just reverence — the closed loop of these assassins evokes the fatalist trappings forcing the cinematic criminals of the ‘40s into desperate circumstances.

Classic film noir is a genre firmly rooted in the economic and social dynamics of post-war America, and Looper’s near-future dystopia evokes the turmoil of that era. Kansas City is a metropolitan slum where the haves dull themselves in grimy nightclubs with eyedrop psychedelics, and the have-nots are shot in the streets for petty theft; it’s a familiar glimpse of extreme class disparity heightened by the manipulation of time and the presence of a telekinesis gene in 10% of the population. It’s in this late-stage hellscape of urban decay and speculative science that our main character Joe (Joeseph Gordon-Levitt) ekes out a living as a looper himself.

One of the most brilliant parts of Rian Johnson’s screenplay is its matter-of-fact approach to the headache of time travel — the film explains the rules that matter early on, and then immediately weaponizes the consequences for breaking them against our lead. When Joe’s coworker Seth (Paul Dano) fails to close his loop and allows his future self to run, we see in mortifying detail what the playbook for that scenario is — present Seth is kidnapped and mutilated by the syndicate, and the scars materializing on his time-displaced counterpart are more than enough incentive for him to turn back around and meet his own demise. Joe, after some guilty tears, is more than content enough to return back to work and keep stacking the bars of future silver he’s saving for retirement…until he’s looking at himself from 30 years in the future (played by Bruce Willis).

Unlike other, less successful time-travel films, Looper isn’t concerned with getting lost in the speculative minutiae, because at its core it’s a movie about desperate people in desperate circumstances. Old Joe has come back in time to prevent the rise of a mysterious, monstrous new crime boss known only as The Rainmaker — a man responsible for the death of Joe’s wife in the future, a man who is only a child in the present of 2044. Young Joe, haughty and permanently stuck in the now, only wants to close his loop and set his life back on the self-destructive path he prefers, but Old Joe, seemingly wiser and more self-aware thanks to finding some kind of solace through love, wants to preserve what he thinks is salvation.

Eventually Young Joe stumbles onto the farm of Sara (Emily Blunt) and her son Cid (Pierce Gagnon), discovering a sort of impermanent family amongst them before the startling realization sets in that Cid, an extremely powerful telekinetic, will grow up to become the Rainmaker. Like so much classic film noir, Looper is ultimately a story about traumatized men using violence to force their world to make some sort of sense. “That’s just men trying to figure out what they would do to keep what’s theirs,” Young Joe tells Cid at one point, a line burning with irony. At the same time Young Joe begins growing beyond his selfish nature, Old Joe embraces bloodshed in the pursuit of selfishly holding on to the past — threatening to trap Cid in a cycle of vengeance that circles round and round like an ouroboros.

Looper is a benchmark of what great sci-fi spectacle should be: it balances some exhilarating and inventive action with a thought-provoking vision of a familiar future, and yet the worldbuilding never consumes the central and intimate character drama. It’s easy to see how a man who approached time travel with such a deft, inventive touch would go on to leave a similar subversive mark on Star Wars. Both The Last Jedi and the Knives Out films deconstruct foundational archetypes while affirming the relevance they still have today, and Looper uses time travel to do the same thing with film noir — proving that there’s a reason we’re still so drawn to stories about bad men fumbling around in the darkness for a chance at absolution.

Looper is now streaming on Netflix.