Has the future started yet? I was wondering that yesterday, when I pulled out my iPhone (4 not 5, i'm not that hip), and watched as a little blue dot representing me on a GPS tracked my progress to a theatre, where I'd see a movie using a ticket I had purchased out of thin air with my phone. All of this, accomplished with a few taps of the finger. Sure, it's not teleporters and laser guns, but the gap between our present, and the expectations older generations had for it, is rapidly closing.

Which is probably why science fiction keeps coming back to the few ideas that have always seemed beyond our reach, like time travel. For as insane, probably impossible, as its existence might be, we've gone out of our way to make sure that whoever figures it out first can just watch a movie or read a book to figure out who got it right. It could turn out as simple as Back to the Future, or as paralyzingly complex as Primer. What makes Rian Johnson's take on the concept, Looper, so fascinating, is that it's interested in the motives behind time travel, not just the mechanics.

As futuristic assassin Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) lays out matter-of-factly, time travel is a part of life 30 years from now, even if it won't be invented for another 60. Crime lords of the year 2074 maintain a monopoly on the technology, using it to extradite troublemakers from their time to 2044, to be eliminated by low-level triggermen called loopers. A high-ranking transplant from the future, Abe (Jeff Daniels), organizes the hits, and was responsible for setting an orphaned Joe on a path: be at the right place, at the right time, and dispose of the anonymous person who appears there. Do that, and you're rewarded with money, respect, and any number of immediate pleasures.

The opening act is like a good piece of pulpy short fiction, showing us what would happen if the noir-influenced world of Johnson's first film, Brick, were left to rust. Kansas of 2044 is all blown-out windows and busted rain gutters, where the sign outside the local looper gin joint, La Belle Aurore, is written in font you'd find on the cover of any James Ellroy novel. It's a world going to hell slowly enough to not cause a panic, just a creeping sense of dread, and the drapes change every few years so that no one notices that the building is burning down around them.

"Most loopers aren't the forward-thinking type," Joe says of his colleagues (tellingly, the looper weapon of choice, retro blunderbusses, only have a range of 15 yards), but he's almost as short-sighted as they are. Despite his greater awareness of what the world has become, and where it is heading, Joe just uses this knowledge to rationalize his own series of bad, self-interested decisions. If the party is almost over, might as well get yours before the music stops. As part of his contract, Joe will eventually have to kill his future self, sent back in time to 2044 in order to wipe out any evidence they ever existed. Failing to "close the loop" has fatal consequences for both vintages of the looper, as evidenced by a gut-churning sequence where an older looper on the lam dissolves, bit by bit, as his former self is slowly butchered.

When Joe botches the hit on his future self (Bruce Willis), they both become targets, the difference being that Older Joe comes with a mission: find those responsible for sending him back from 2074, and kill them in the past. And just when you think Looper is going to reach for the throttle, Johnson reins it in, and starts to pull the rug out from under you. There are still a number of gritty and violent shootouts ahead, and plenty more time-bending logistics, but instead of turning up to full boil, Looper settles into a slow burn, and Johnson's stylish action flick transforms into a sci-fi-infused character study.

That two key pieces of the ensemble -a steely farm owner (Emily Blunt) and her gifted son (Pierce Gagnon)- aren't introduced until the midpoint shows the deliberate measures Johnson takes to invest us in the story of a man literally at war with himself. Willis, as the world-weary Old Joe, at first seems like the embodiment of all the signposts from the future that Young Joe has been ignoring, a living warning of what a life of nihilistic complacency can lead to. Yet Johnson constructs his characters with deep histories- not just backstories, but lifetimes of hard choices and tragedy, made apparent through a line of dialogue, or just a look. What becomes clear is that the events of the past aren't what's obdurate, it's the people.

With nods to Akira, Twelve Monkeys and even a bit of Superman, Johnson's eclectic tastes are fuelled by just the right amount of the quirk that overwhelmed many moments of his last film, The Brothers Bloom. And the look recalls another think piece, Tree of Life, only one that backs up the dreamy visuals with some lucid thinking. Well, to a point. The technicals of time travel are mostly elided by Old Joe giving a hand-waving explanation that the exact details are "cloudy."

This will irk purists and create as much discussion about the story's mechanics as its themes, but Looper is so, so much more about the latter than the former. Johnson thinks the world of tomorrow is coming faster than we think, and that's something to be afraid of. When the powerful finale arrives, and three generations of people are forced to make choices about what the future will be, it feels relevant, and urgent. If that's not the hallmark of great science fiction, what is?

5 out of 5

Directed by Rian Johnson

2012, USA

Originally Posted August 25th, 2010

Come on. We all knew this was how it was going to turn out. No matter how badly we wanted to believe they could do it, too much time has passed. When we all heard that Sylvester Stallone was going to unite the biggest action heroes of the last thirty years under one blood-soaked banner, the internet's collective jubilation was laced with a deep-seated fear that this would be an impossible feat to pull off. In trying to recapture the spirit of the 80’s action flick, The Expendables plays more like a relic, just with modern trimmings. Its aging stars and uninspired script, which must have been about twenty pages if one-liners were excluded, make you wonder if this was a genre that should have just stayed put in the more reptilian crevices of your memory. Even when trying to deliver the gratuitous explosions and gunfire that made the likes of First Blood and Commando genre classics, The Expendables can’t get a grip on the advances of special effects, and sacrifices authenticity for the sake of one-upmanship.

After a ponderously slow first few minutes, we meet the titular group of manly-men mercenaries, including Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy “The Natural” Couture and the leader of the outfit, writer/director Sylvester Stone. The foreplay is brief, as it's mere moments after the introductions that a pirate is literally blown in half by a shotgun blast. You might say the dismemberment and copious CG blood are holdovers from Stone’s last directorial outing, Rambo, as it’s a good barometer for what the next hundred or so minutes are going to be like.

After successfully returning to their tattoo parlour/bar/all-around-man-cave run by Mickey Rourke, Sly accepts a suicide mission from a CIA handler played with deadly seriousness by Bruce Willis, in an overly advertised and far too brief scene featuring Stallone, Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the same room. It’s hard not to bro-out a little during the scene, as Schwarzenegger’s entrance is punctuated by an inexplicable divine light, while the winks and nods between the three great apes are telegraphed with the finesse of a bat to the face.

Being the good soldier of fortune that he is, Barney signs up the crew to take down a military dictator in the sinisterly named island nation of Vilena, where there’s some scheme involving coke fields, an ex-CIA spook and Steve Austin. There are betrayals, unrequited loves and perfunctory speeches about the soulless life of a mercenary, none of which are handled with much subtlety, but subtlety isn’t what this movies about now is it? It’s about shit blowing up, bones being busted, SMASH-BAM-POW-GAAAR. Which isn’t so much The Expendables's only redeeming trait as it is pretty much its only trait period.

This is an action movie from start to finish, so it won’t confuse anyone who accidentally walked in thinking this was Eat Pray Love. To his credit, Stallone knows how to stage shoot-outs and fist-fights, and boy are there plenty. The number of baddies disposed of by Stallone’s motley crew borders on genocidal, and it’s a rare feat that an action scene can be so skilfully chaotic that a man’s head literally blowing up isn’t the centre of attention. The action is by no means flawless, as all the gunfire and exploding can be desensitizing by the time the film reaches its bombastic final twenty minutes, and a pair of car chases in the film’s first half may be some of the worst filmed in recent memory.

What really holds back blood-n-guts orgy are the attempts made to use newer special effects to beef up the skirmishes, the apparent aim being to make every other action movie obsolete. It was probably because of Rambo that Stallone decided you could get more blood for less by adding it in during post-processing. And hey, while we’re at it, why not get rid of the rigidity inherent in actual explosions and just code it for cheap? It’s understandable really, audiences just aren’t wowed by violence the way they once were and the solution is always just to add more and more. But in doing so, The Expendables betrays the very films it seeks to honour. Sure John McClane only blows away about a dozen dudes in Die Hard, but it looked real. When the roof of the Nakatomi Plaza blew up, you were watching a giant explosion consume a building and it felt real. With TheExpendables, the sheer overload of the set pieces combined with the CG effects, which range from passable to laughable, dissolves what little sense of reality the film wants to maintain.

This wouldn’t be quite so frustrating if the movie were good at anything besides action, but Stallone’s words don’t flow nearly as well as his fists. When your characters are a biker gang of Neanderthals, there’s no real room for character development, and attempts at being reflective about the whole killing business feel shoehorned in. The greater shame is that the film’s many, many one-liners, a staple of the genre, are almost entirely forgettable, and it doesn’t help that between various accents and Stallone’s growling that much of the line delivery can be tough to interpret. But again, brilliant writing isn’t one of the things The Expendables is aiming to achieve and it looks to supplement words with casting. Despite his noticeably aged face, Stallone’s giant everythings ensure he’s who you imagine leading a suicide squad of mercs, and Statham brings his trademark frame and charm to what few scenes he’s in that require actual acting. It’s a hell of a crew Stallone’s assembled, almost to a fault. Crews is under-utilized and it’s easy to forget that Couture is even in this movie, although he does once and for all finish the debate between the UFC and WWE fans.

Be wary of advertisements claiming that this will be the first and only time we’re going to see such a macho medley of beefheads join forces, as receipts have been strong and the film’s ending presents future jobs for The Expendables as a certainty (which also enforces how much of a misnomer their title is). But what could have been a testosterone fuelled tribute to filmmaking of years past turned out to be a retread that simply drags out a genre and cast that’s just not as youthful as it once was. You got me this time Stallone, but by invoking the hallowed images of your past works and actors like you, you set yourself up to sit in the shadows of the classics that defined the action movie. And no amount of CG blood can cover that up.

2 out of 5

Directed by Sylvester Stallone

2010, USA