Looper might come across like an action film from the trailer but conceptually it’s pure sci-fi, and although it’s packed to the gills with violence and gore, at its root it’s an exploration into the nature of choices and consequences. In many ways it epitomises the new wave of science fiction cinema.
Sci-fi in the movies has had two golden ages. The first was in the 50’s when the flood of small studios putting out B-movies allowed writers, many of whom were alcoholics, drug fiends, sexual deviants, political outsiders, to express their otherness through films about aliens encountering the same suspicious world, that in real life was rooting out anyone too far left of centre in Hollywood.
The second came in the seventies. Fuelled by Hollywood’s new countercultural leanings and reacting against the peaceful, orderly human future predicted by Star Trek, 70’s sci-fi films invariably centred around an outside fighting against the tyranny of futuristic jumpsuited conformity. Charlton Heston starred in about half of them, most memorably Planet of the Apes, while Logan’s Run, Silent Running, the bonkers Zardoz and the excellent Rollerball all explored similar ideas – how a dystopian future came to achieve a form of peace by striking some sort of terrible bargain with itself in its past.
That era was put to bed by the success of Star Wars, which basically recast the sci-fi movie as a genre film in space, and whose success paved the way for a host of horror and action films where aliens or future criminals replaced black hatted cowboys or gangsters. Some, like the first two Alien films, did spectacular things with that template, but for the most part Star Wars’ ubiquity eliminated any attempt at deeper meaning in sci-fi films, though some, such as Blade Runner and Total Recall (both Philip K Dick adaptations) still used the form to pose questions about identity and humanity.
And now we have a third wave – big budget sci-fi blockbusters, of which Looper is only the most recent. District 9 used aliens as a metaphor for apartheid and how discrimination ends up dehumanising us all, Inception studied the unreliability of memory and its unstinting power over us, and Duncan Jones’ Moon and Source Code used the concept of high technology to toy with the structure of
the films themselves and examined the desire of people to change the past.
Looper ploughss a similar furrow to those films, and Duncan Jones’ in particular, since it uses time travel to question whether anything we do really does have big consequences. It’s interesting in that, unlike many other time travel films, it doesn’t really try to address the ‘butterfly effect’ idea that any small change brings about changes on a planetary scale. Any changes are framed solely within the effect on the primary characters, which in turn makes the themes personal. Big budgets exploring what makes people who they are – could anything be truer to sci-fi’s central core?
Looper is showing at the Rich Mix this week.
