Looper

- the time travel machine looks like a diving bell

This week's movie rental was Looper, a 2012 science fiction film about time travel and starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's set in the 2040s, when organized crime is rampant and time travel has just been discovered. Time travel is made illegal, and the crime bosses are the only ones who use it ... you know what they say: when time travel is outlawed, only outlaws will have time travel ;).

Roger Ebert gave the movie 3.5 stars out of 4 in his review. Here's the beginning of it ...

Rian Johnson's "Looper," a smart and tricky sci-fi story, sidesteps the paradoxes of time travel by embracing them. Most time travel movies run into trouble in the final scenes, when impossibilities pile up one upon another. This film leads to a startling conclusion that wipes out the story's paradoxes so neatly it's as if it never happened. You have to grin at the ingenuity of Johnson's screenplay.

The movie takes place in 2044 and 2074, both of which look like plausible variations of the American present, and then there are a few scenes set in a futuristic Shanghai. We learn that although time travel is declared illegal once it has been discovered, a crime syndicate cheats and uses it as a method for disposing of its enemies. Imagine this. A man with shotgun stands by himself in a field. A second man materializes out of thin air. The first man blasts a hole in him.

The thin-air guy, who was bound and hooded, is a man from the future who has been sent back in time to be assassinated. The shotgun guy is known as a "Looper." He has been sent back into time to be the trigger man. Eventually, when he grows old enough, he will be sent back in time to be killed by his own younger self. This is known as "closing the loop." ....

The movie was grim, it was hard to respect the main character, at least at first (he betrayed his best friend for money), and there was a *lot* of violence (rated R). But still, it was pretty interesting, all in all, especially once the main character's older self (Willis) is sent back to the past and interacts with his younger self.

Here's the trailer ...