Looper is a 2012 American science fiction action thriller movie written and directed by Rian Johnson and produced by Ram Bergman and James D. Stern. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, and Bruce Willis. It revolves around “present-day” assassins called “loopers” hired by crime syndicates from the future to terminate victims they send back in time.
When Looper’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt and two versions of Bruce Willis’ Joe come face to face, the movie quickly becomes a stunning sci-fi fable about the complexities of time travel. Even knowing that the loopers are eventually sent to the past where they unwittingly kill their older selves, Young Joe inadvertently lets Old Joe live. In doing so, he deals with Old Joe’s idea of killing the Rainmaker—the person behind his wife’s death—and thus prevents their current predicament by altering the timeline.
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Looper: Movie Synopsis
In 2044, 25-year-old Joe works for a crime syndicate in Kansas City as a hitman, or “looper.” With surveillance systems in the future of 2074 making it nearly impossible to dispose of bodies undetected, the Syndicate sends their enemies back in time to be executed. Led by a man from the future named Abe, the Bows kill and dispose of victims whose faces are hidden, receiving silver bars attached to their targets as payment.
To hide their connection to the Syndicate, all Loopers who survive to 2074 are sent back and killed by their own younger selves, a process called “closing the loop”. These targets are marked with gold bars, not the silver ones that mark the end of the loop.
Joe’s friend Seth confesses to Joe that he failed in his mission to kill his future self. Old Seth escaped after warning Seth that a person in the future named Rainmaker would overthrow the five main bosses and close all the loops. Joe reluctantly hides Seth in his apartment’s floor safe, but later reveals his location after Abe threatens to confiscate half of Joe’s saved silver. Abe’s elite “Gat Men” capture Seth, cut the address into his arm, and begin dismembering the body parts. These effects appear on Old Seth’s body; he goes to the address on his arm and is shot by Kid Blue, one of the Gat Men.
When Joe’s next target arrives, it’s his older self, but with his face exposed and his hands unbound. Old Joe escapes before Joe can kill him. When Joe returns to his apartment to find it ransacked by the Gat Men, he fights Kid Blue, falls down the fire escape, and blacks out.
In another timeline, Joe actually kills his older self. He moves to Shanghai and becomes a hitman to finance his drug addiction and wild lifestyle. Eventually, he gets married and with the help of his wife breaks the addiction. Seven years later, his wife is killed when Joe is taken away to close the loop. Overpowering his captors, Old Joe returns to 2044 and changes his history by avoiding and escaping Joe.
Old Joe experiences hazy memories of Joe’s actions in the present and meets his younger self at the restaurant. He wants to change history again and save his wife by killing Rainmaker as a child. He obtains a map from the local library using the numbers written on his hand, which are supposed to belong to the Rainmaker’s identity. Kid Blue and the Gat Men show up and a shootout ensues. Both Joes escape with the pieces of the map.
Joe follows the map to a farm where a woman named Sara lives with her young son Cid. Sara recognizes the numbers on the map as Cid’s birthday and the location of the hospital where he was born. Joe guesses that Old Joe will kill all three babies born in that hospital on the same day, not knowing which one will become the Rainmaker.
Jesse, the Gat Man, arrives at the farm, but Cid and Joe hide. Later that night, Sara and Joe have sex, and Sara reveals that while she has slightly above-average telekinetic abilities, Cid’s powers are much stronger. In the morning, Joe wakes up to find Jesse holding Sara at gunpoint. Terrified, Cid kills Jesse using telekinesis. Joe realizes that Cid will become the Rainmaker and that old Joe will now know.
Kid Blue captures Old Joe and takes him to Abe. Old Joe breaks free, kills Abe and his henchmen, and goes to Sara’s farm followed by Kid Blue. While young Joe kills Kid Blue, old Joe pursues Sara and Cid. When Cid’s face is grazed by a bullet, Sara calms him down before he can react and kill someone.
She sends Cid into the cane field and positions herself to block Old Joe’s line of fire. Joe realizes that Cid will become the Rainmaker if Old Joe kills Sara. He commits suicide, erasing Old Joe from existence, saving Sara, and potentially preventing Cid from becoming the Rainmaker.
Looper Ending, Explained: What Happened At The End?
The two most memorable aspects of Looper are its bizarre blunderbuss weapon and its unique approach to depicting time travel. Looper’s time travel is explained as a one-way system using a constant and precise window of 30 years, three months, two days, eight hours, and five seconds, and the complexity of its use immediately made it illegal.
Therefore, it is only used to send back those who have been marked for death by criminal organizations – they are sent to the past, killed, and discarded without any fuss. It is presented as a simple, brilliant, and relatively unproblematic approach to a fictional phenomenon.
A key part of Looper’s time travel is that it is only explained to the extent that its characters understand it. Specific rules are therefore hard to define, although the logic pretty much speaks for itself. Unlike other sci-fi action movies like Tomorrow’s War and its time travel paradox, Looper plays its science straight to the chest, making it difficult to dismiss logically.
The only thing that really matters about the movie’s use of time travel as a plot is that it’s only one way, and what happens in the present affects a person from the future – as evidenced by a gruesome scene involving the torture of Seth (Paul Dano).
One strange and somewhat unexplained element of Looper’s story is how the titular assassins are forced to unknowingly kill their future selves. It’s billed as “closing the loop” and comes with a hefty payday and the explicit knowledge that the looper in question has exactly 30 years left. Although Looper doesn’t get into the intricacies of why loopers close their own loops, the logic behind the idea is easy to work out.
Looper explains that the dangerous nature of time travel led to it being banned in the first place, which is why even criminals who use it are wary. That’s basically the idea behind each looper closing its own loops: it’s neat and tidy and allows the life and death of each looper to remain separate from the others.
If it was done otherwise, the loops would terminate each other and if there was ever a problem with one loop closing; it could have a ripple effect that would devastate the entire organization. Having each looper close their own loop is therefore a logical means of keeping their work closed, even if it doesn’t quite work out for Joe in the end.
Looper’s unique blend of complexity and simplicity makes it one of director Rian Johnson’s best films, and nowhere is it more evident than in Young Joe’s handling of his predicament. His decision to take his own life is sudden and mostly unexplained, but his reasons can be inferred from the larger context of the movie and from the scene itself. His opposition to Old Joe’s plan was based on his realization that Willis’ character intended to kill Cid to prevent him from becoming the Rainmaker, and Joe’s conflict finally comes to a head in the final scene.
Seeing his older self on a selfish path of destruction, young Joe knows he will kill both Sara and Cid, and sees only one option. By killing himself, he immediately removes Old Joe from the equation by erasing him from existence—like a dark inversion of Marty McFly’s Back to the Future story—thus allowing Cid to live out his days with Sara in peace. He does this in the hopes that Cid will grow up to not become the Rainmaker, but it’s equally about Young Joe refusing to become a man capable of murdering children for his own selfish ends.
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