Posted In: Saw It For You

A service of Saw It For You isn’t just previewing movies that haven’t been released yet — or in some cases, even made yet — it’s also to save you time on entertainment available right now. So here is our review of Rian Johnson’s Looper, which opened this past weekend. WARNING: ENORMOUS SPOILERS.

Looper (2012)

Synopsis. In the future, crime lords control time travel, but there’s just one problem: everyone you send back in time turns into Bruce Willis.

Trivia

Director Rian Johnson spent $30 million of the film’s budget on building an actual time machine. Another $750,000 was spent on hospital care for Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt after their exposure to it.

The first draft of the film contained over eighty different time puns, such as “isn’t it time we got out of here?” and “I must be a hungry time traveler, because I’m going back 4 seconds.” After three extensive rewrites, Johnson went with the first draft.

To film small numbers of Bruce Willises, lookalike extras were fitted with bald caps. For crowd scenes, makeup artists had the 500-plus lookalikes stand beneath a single flesh-colored parachute.

The ending was changed after test audiences responded poorly to Joseph Gordon-Levitt looking at the camera to say “ehhh, ain’t I a stinker?” followed by an iris out.

In order to maintain an authentic mood, Looper was shot over the course of the next 30 years.

Mistakes

In the first time travel sequence, Joseph Gordon-Levitt enters the time machine via its top hatch, but when he arrives in 2043 he emerges from an old witch’s cauldron.

According to the film’s logic, de-aging might have restored Bruce Willis’ missing arm, but de-aging further would not have given him a third arm, let alone an arm he “never knew was missing.”

Continuity. When Emily Blunt wakes Joseph Gordon-Levitt up, she is sipping chocolate milk from a cup. When she offers Gordon-Levitt a sip, she is sipping chocolate milk from Gordon-Levitt’s open mouth.

When Emily Blunt wakes Joseph Gordon-Levitt up, she is sipping chocolate milk from a cup. When she offers Gordon-Levitt a sip, she is sipping chocolate milk from Gordon-Levitt’s open mouth. Incorrectly regarded as goof. Because of a product placement deal, the only thing to eat in the future is French’s Yellow Mustard. It is conceivable that the hardy mustard seed was the only plant to survive the Time War of Twenty-One-Twenty-Never.

Because of a product placement deal, the only thing to eat in the future is French’s Yellow Mustard. It is conceivable that the hardy mustard seed was the only plant to survive the Time War of Twenty-One-Twenty-Never. Despite the multiple times Rian Johnson appears in frame shouting “edit me out in post,” he never was.

Knives do not “mature” into guns when buried.

Billy goats are not “nature’s time travelers.”

Plot hole. Grand theft auto would not produce enough energy to power a time machine, even if said machine did run on “crime energy.”

Grand theft auto would not produce enough energy to power a time machine, even if said machine did run on “crime energy.” In the final scene of the movie, Bruce Willis tells Emily Blunt that he “was Hitler all along.” This is obviously dubbed in; Willis’s lips clearly mouth the name “Gandhi.”

Hitler was not an old bald Indian man.

Telling someone that they die in the future — regardless of the existence of time travel — would not cause them to dramatically fade from existence while screaming “noooo.”

Memorable Quotes

Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). So you’re me? From the future?

Old Joe (Bruce Willis). Shut your stupid child mouth. I got something important to tell you.

Young Joe. I guess I timed that poorly.

Sara (Emily Blunt). The mob is coming after you, Joe.

Young Joe. Then I guess it’s go-time. And Joe-time. And Joe-time.

Old Joe. You’ll never catch me!

Young Joe. I don’t have to! I’m placing myself under arrest!

Old Joe. Damn! (clothes suddenly change to prison uniform)

Sara. I don’t understand. You did all this?

Old Joe. Yeah. Turns out I’m from the past. I was [Hitler] all along. That’s how I knew my young self would use passive resistance. He’s a [Nazi].

Sara. Namaste.