Looper (2012): An Excellent Adventure

Hi everybody, and welcome to another installment, episode, chapter, whatever you want to call it, of Excellent Adventures.

And I'm here, as always, with my good friends Paul Tonks and Ellen Cheshire.

Hello! Welcome back, always, and welcome to everyone who's taken the time to listen to this.

This conversation is, we're going to zero in on Looper, which is a film that was written and directed by... by Rian Johnson, who in the years since has become, since this movie was released, has become really quite a major figure in Hollywood filmmaking.

And Looper has been on the cards for us to talk about for a while.

It was released in 2012.

The premise, I mean, just to jump straight to it a little bit, I mean, we'll go into it more, of course, so that's the point of the conversation, really, but the premise is that time travel in the future is an experience that exists.

It can happen.

but it has been really criminalized.

And so you can only use it if you can pay for it on a kind of black market situation.

So this story is about the elimination of a particular person by getting them traveling back into the past so that they can be dealt with by a hitman in the past.

So the story is set in 2044 and 2074.

So both timeframes are obviously in the future, but one is further into the future than the other.

It's a nicely, densely plotted story, and that's certainly true of this film, and certainly true of Rian Johnson's other movies as well.

People may be very familiar with his name now because of his Knives Out trilogy of films, which are a series of whodunit crime movies starring Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc who is sort of in the tradition of Hercule Poirot and so on but this film you know is a sci-fi movie and a time travel movie and those two things go together like peaches and cream much of the time that's what we're focusing on today but you know it might be that I don't know maybe I'm getting ahead of myself it might be that we can see some connections with some of his other films in terms of the intricacy of the plotting and the playing with time and space So that's a very brief, very sketchy place to start from.

But just to say that's the movie that we're going to talk about for this conversation.

And again, some of you listening to this will have seen it, some of you will not.

And we hope always that if you haven't seen a given movie that we're talking about, that it might be nice to think that our conversation sends you towards it rather than away from it.

That would be the name of the game.

We'll get on with the conversation itself.

I mean, Ellen, if I may start with you, if that's okay, just to ask the very familiar question, which is what your familiarity is with the film.

Is this something you saw when it was originally released, or is this something that's come to you later on?