Hacker Cinema
Looper
2012 · Film · 118 min
Directed by Rian Johnson
In the year 2044, time travel has not yet been invented but in 30 years it will have been. When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they will send their target into the past where a looper, a hired gun, like Joe is waiting to mop up. Joe is getting rich and life is good until the day the mob decides to close the loop, sending back Joe's future self for assassination.
9 positive9 negative1 mixed11 neutralfrom 30 commenters
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31 comments on Hacker News
Google summaries from websites mainly did this before “AI” came around. Now I just don’t know the source unless I dig myself. Would rather it went back to before, or at least they implemented the veracity checks better.
I thought it was interested that the movie looper had argidrones, but what inspired that wasn’t part of the training set or discussion online. I get remarkably bad answers and search results which seem misleading at best.
The line in that sci-fi movie Looper haunts me: “Son, I come from the future, go to China”
Advances in technology, green tech, electric cars, high speed rail are impressive.
Meanwhile the US is actively attacking science, freedom, rule of law.
China pulls ahead and US falls behind.
Although I think outsiders fail to realize just how little freedom to dissent exists in China.
Bruce Willis starred in one such movie, "Looper".
The 2010s in sci-fi gaves us:
- Dredd
- Melancholia (may not qualify for some sci-fi fans, I suppose, and I can understand why—it's so very allegorical)
- High Life
- Under the Skin
- Annihilation
- Ex Machina
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- Blade Runner 2049
- Sorry to Bother You
- Arrival
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- The Last Jedi (I know lots of people hated it—I think it's the only more-or-less good Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, and was shocked at the broadly-negative reaction, having come out of the theater thinking "finally, we got a good one, even if it did play the ending way too safe; everyone's going to be so happy!". We're not gonna change each other's minds in HN comments. Agree to disagree.)
And that's just the ones I've seen and thought were somewhere between good and great. And that I could remember or quickly find a reminder of with a quick search. I hear very good things about the new Planet of the Apes series (like, "each entry is better than the last" good) but have only seen the first one. Lots of people liked Rogue One, Snowpiercer, Ad Astra, and Interstellar (I didn't, or at least didn't think they were notably good, but hey, lots of people did). Godzilla, Pacific Rim, and Kong were OK romps. Heard good things about Upgrade and Attack the Block, but haven't seen them. The Martian was OK (some loved it). Inception was alright (again, lots of others like it way more than I do).
How many really good sci-fi movies did the 70s produce? The 80s? I think we're doing fine.
> (old enough that I should be shot according to the movie Primer)
I think you mean Looper! Both are great movies though
There's quite a few directors who credit Murakami as an influence on their works.
Rian Johnson credits HBW+EOW as an influence on Looper.
Wong Kar-wai says he took inspiration from Murakami in Chunking Express.
David Mitchell is clearly influenced by his works (worth reading if you're a Murakami fan). His novel Cloud Atlas got a film adaptation with Tom Hanks and some other big names.
In anime, Satoshi Kon and Makoto Shinkai have said Murakami was a big influence on them. There's also Haibane Renmei which was influenced by HBW+EOW (IMO not worth watching). Probably plenty more anime with similar styles because it's a more suitable medium for the kind of surrealism in Murakami's novels. You might like Psycho-Pass, GITS, Lain which share some of the same elements of Murakami's works.
First some that I don't see mentioned here yet:
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Limitless (2011)
Looper (2012)
Upgrade (2018)
Source Code (2011)
District 9 (2009)
Black Mirror S3E2: "Playtest", S4E1: "USS Callister"
The 7 minute YouTube video "Slaughterbots"[1]
The YouTube series The Backrooms[2]
If you are worried about your son hearing swear words and seeing blood, and not just whether or not he will be able to understand/appreciate the movie, then you probably want to wait with a couple of those.
And then I would also agree with those here that mention Inception, Interstellar, Back to the Future, The Martian, Men in Black, Minority Report, The Terminator, Terminator 2, and The Expanse. I also don't think he should have much of a problem following along with The Matrix.
[1]: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU [2]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqORBioE4Yhol_z
I’m sorry, but if you start your complaint by saying Looper is some brilliant thing that sets the bar, or whatever, I’m not going to be taking you very seriously. The plot for that was so full of holes they literally had to invent a gun that only works if the target is about two feet away for the movie to not end in the first 15 minutes.
Reading the piece it seems like the author is upset they weren’t able to guess the suspect, and blamed the movie for it.
I watched it twice over the weekend, and the second viewing showed how many details were in plain view the whole time. Which was the central gag of the movie.
Up front, I’ve liked every Johnson film, except for Looper. Not that Looper was poorly crafted, just that I didn’t connect with it.
I thought Last Jedi was the best SW movie since Empire, since it had actual things to say. Andor is the only other SW media I’ve seen that I’ve enjoyed as much.
So I’m clearly in Johnson’s audience.
> To my mind, letting Abrams double-down on swerving back to his plot in episode 9 was their biggest management sin when it comes to creating a coherent plot arc.
Abrams was an Executive Producer on Ep 8 still and was supposedly in the room for all of the plot development. He personally could have avoided most of that swerve had he been paying attention. Admittedly, he thought at the time it was Trevorrow's problem because Disney didn't fire Trevorrow from Ep 9 until the "last minute", but there's a lot of interesting questions left about what Abrams even thought the "resolution" could possibly be even with Trevorrow at the helm. He was still an Executive Producer in a role that should have been preparing for the trilogy as a whole to succeed.
It takes a village to make a movie and all that, and I'm not personally blaming Abrams, though it sounds like it, I think Disney management should have been more involved too. The whole Trevorrow thing reeks of Disney management failure and bad contract planning. (Between that and the shenanigans with Lord/Miller over Solo…)
I think Abrams made the best movie for Ep 9 that he could have given the time, budget, and resources he had to meet a "set in stone" holiday release date. I think he did the best he could with what Johnson left him, and honestly I don't think anyone could have resolved Johnson's plot twists well and still have felt like Star Wars. He had good ideas in absentia, but they weren't "Star Wars".
(Admittedly, I thought Ep 8 was the entire wrong genre for Star Wars: it was a Vietnam War movie in a franchise built around World War 2 metaphors/aesthetics. I also had a big issue with the "Three Billboards problem" of Poe in Ep 8. In my eyes he's unreedemably the villain of the film, and the character is entirely broken beyond repair in Ep 8. But also, admittedly, I haven't liked any of Rian Johnson's films that I've watched [inc. Knives Out; and I especially hated Looper].)
There's a rumor on a Polish website that CP2077 underwent a major plot overhaul in the middle of development. According to this hypothesis, supported by some early quotes, there were initially going to be 3 mentor characters to choose from:
Johnny Silverhand (tech solutions, tech weapons), Morgan Blackhand (handguns?, power weapons), Saburo Arasaka (Hacking, smart weapons)
It is said that 2018 e3 gameplay presentation featured the choice of mentors.
Then Keanu Reeves turned up. Eventually the marketing team had a brilliant idea to get more out of Keanu. And since he's so awesome, why not make the game MORE about Keanu... In fact, why waste budget and manpower on the other 2 actors?
This type of problem with high profile actors is endemic in movie industry. A movie with Bruce Willis or Ryan Gosling will be about Bruce Willis and Ryan Gosling. The actors don't have to even act that well because plot will be adjusted to play into their strengths.(Look how much screen time aging Bruce Willis got in Looper and the new Blade Runner!)
(polish) https://www.wykop.pl/link/5853285/czy-rola-keanu-reevsa-jest-jednym-ze-zrodel-problemow-w-cyberpunku2077/
There are various speculations in the thread, including that the game is so lacking in its systems (police, NPC schedules, driving...) because they were ordered to cut them out. They were meant to be in the game initially, but major direction shifts in the development meant they had to reassign developers to something else.
Some content in the game seems to support this line of thinking. There's a quest with a monk that works slightly differently depending on which story act you're in.
There are some hints that developers really wanted to make a great game, but were gaslighted and bullshitted by the management. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-18/cyberpunk-game-maker-faces-hostile-staff-after-failed-launch
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If you want to know my opinion, I think CDPR also overestimated their ability. A modern, urban world works very differently than fantasy sword game. CDPR had 3 games to perfect the formula, then they jumped into completely different setting. I don't blame them, in fact I feel for them because it's nice to work on something different once in a while.
> economies of scale
Its interesting, there was a VFX company that was called Atomic Fiction, that worked on Looper, Sully and a few other big budget films. They were entirely cloud based.
in about 2014 it did look like everything was going to the cloud. Upgrading a render farm takes mega bucks($1-4 million for a large company) so converting that to a pay-and-go solution looked interesting financially.
A lot of high end "live" editing/colour correcting is done remotely, because the machines are too noisy to have in the same room. (obviously 10ms lag is trivial compared to 45 plus loss)
I think the thing that stopped the cloud rollout was how revisions are made. A scene in a film typically will be priced based on the number of people hours the company thinks it'll take +x%. However a film _producer_ will demand n number of revisions to change things. Those are normally not charged for.
So if you have your own compute, it only costs you staff and power. _but_ if you are pay and go, it also costs you CPU rental as well.
I think you are right, I suspect that at some point either Amazon, or more likely google are going to start giving away software with CPU time. (something like https://www.zyncrender.com/)
I've lost count of the number of times I've been listening to two people talk to each other and they both have no idea what the other is saying.
I'll understand both people and know that the response doesn't follow what was just said by the other person, but then the other person will respond in kind with something equally or more ... non sequitur for the lack of a better word.
Then I think, "How many times have I, myself, been in such a conversation?"
How much of what someone is saying to me do I think I understand but really didn't? How many times has someone said to me, "You aren't understanding what I'm saying." and I say, "No I get it!" But I don't.
And then what do I do in that situation? I used to say stuff like, "Wait a minute, you are talking about Looper and you're talking about Inception and you both think you're talking about the same movie."
But then I just decided to let them talk and not worry so much about miscommunication. It seems like such a high percentage of communication that I realized it doesn't really matter. Talking to someone isn't about communicating ideas, it's mostly about the comfort of having someone to talk to.
Likewise, podcasts, youtubes, etc are more about the background noise than they are the content.
People just don't want to feel alone.
Here's one of the better compilations I've found:
http://www.businessinsider.com/hollywood-movies-in-china-2016-10/
I'm not an expert on this, but I think the China-set scenes are generally included in the U.S. theatrical cut, Skyfall's sniper fight in Shanghai being an example [0]. I did a little more Googling and found there were a few examples of scenes meant only for China and left out of the U.S. release. Iron Man 3 apparently had 4 more minutes in which Dr. Wu gets some time to hawk Chinese products [1]. Apparently, some notable Chinese bloggers/moviegoers didn't like the obvious shilling [2].
There are far more examples of things being cut out than being added. In Skyfall's Shanghai scene for example, Chinese censors apparently didn't like the bit where Bond kills a security guard. The listed reasoning for the cuts are heavy-handed to the point of amusement, e.g. ""Mission: Impossible 3" dropped a shot of clothes on clotheslines in Shanghai for the Chinese cut. Apparently, the lack of dryer ownership is a sensitive issue." [2]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMW4dN5sGb0
[1] https://kotaku.com/why-many-in-china-hate-iron-man-3s-chinese-version-486840429
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39m85puOQok
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/how-chinas-censors-influence-hollywood
edit: Apparently Looper, which changed one of its locales from Paris to Shanghai, has extra scenes for Chinese audiences:
http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the_extra_looper_scenes_y
A pretty substantial flaw in the piece, almost enough to sink it, is the suggestion that Looper is somehow more worthy of calling out than Primer. Tsk... somebody sack the fact checkers...
Primer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/
(Interesting not least because its budget was about 50p)
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
I think I would have enjoyed the movie a lot more if I had gone into it expecting a cool action movie with neat ideas, rather than something cerebral. If I'm expecting an action movie, I'm willing to forgive holes and hand-waving in the plot and premise because, hey, it's just an action movie, and look at all the cool slow motion exploding crap.
But if I'm expecting cerebral sci-fi, I have high standards for everything being tight and thought out. With those expectations in mind, I found Inception pretty dumb. It makes me wish I'd seen it without hearing all the hype first.
But at least it was better than Looper.
For reference here are the production budgets for Rian Johnson's films:
Brick: $500,000
The Brother's Bloom: $20,000,000
Looper: $60,000,000
The obvious thing that is seen here is that Special Effects and High Profile Actors significantly increase the cost of films. If you had little to no CG (like Brick), you might be able to pull off a ~1M film with new-er talent (like JGL was at the time).
I've noticed some other movies doing the same, for example Looper (great sci-fi movie btw) was on Google Play roughly a week or so before it was on DVD.
Now if only they would offer them DRM free, then we'd be getting somewhere...
My favourites, not in order:
Cabin in the Woods
Looper
The Hobbit
House at the End of the Street
Can't remember much else really. Also seen Twilight but I'd only really recommend that as a date movie.
Django Unchained - Cloud Atlas - Looper - Argo - Easily the best movies I saw this year, they were all really, really awesome.
A friend of mine recently said about Looper: "The whole movie is broken when you take time to think about its logic. It's about a future where it's easier to send someone to the past than hide a body."
No, I never said that. I disliked Looper because its action wasn't very fun, original, or well-choreographed, its stylized look doesn't suit me, Levitt's prosthetics were distracting and unnecessary, and, to a lesser extent, its plot details that involved time travel were really dumb.
The time travel stuff is not my chief complaint, because the movie could have ultimately been enjoyable even with a stupid time travel foundation, in which case my previous comment would still be appropriate. I was merely responding to the claim (which is ridiculously common among critics) that Looper is a "smart" movie.
You rejected Looper because of an "impressive lack of understanding of and commitment to any specific model of time travel"?
Wow. Do you hate the Harry Potter movies for not understanding magic? A movie can be smart without explicitly laying out the axioms of its magical McGuffin.
What time travel movies have you seen? Looper is definitely among the dumbest of the ones I've seen. It seems fairly obvious that the writers were unaware of or never once considered any of the interesting paradoxes of time travel, the chiefest among them being the grandfather paradox. No time was spent exploring anything related to the mechanics or implication of time travel, except for a moment to tell the audience that it's complicated and not to worry about it. One scene in particular, with a man falling apart, shows an impressive lack of understanding of and commitment to any specific model of time travel. After seeing the movie, I was awestruck at the critical reviews which call it an "idea movie."
This year seems to be the year of really really brilliant cinematography.
Skyfall was breathtakingly beautiful in terms of cinematography. It had a solid story too, unlike Prometheus, which while beautiful, falls short on story.
The Dark Knight Rises concludes the series very well. It was well shot, and barring a few continuity issues, it was by all means a very good movie.
Argo was fine as a story, also very well made and I liked it.
One surprise this year which I absolutely loved was Pitch Perfect. My partner had dragged me into an early viewing of the movie, and I didn't know much about it. So yeah, good surprise.
As for the rest, meh. I mean Spiderman and Avengers were fun, but it is not as memorable as the ones I mentioned above. So was Looper
Looper proved that you could successfully harvest the story/character beats, and cool moments from other films and shows without creating any of your own.
It's a bad sign when all of the "original" films in hollywood are just mediocre remakes of other sci-fi and anime. Same goes for Inception.
Moonrise Kingdom was the best. The Hobbit was great.
Looper was good, but the ending wasn't logically consistent I think.
Since no one has mentioned it, I would recommend Dredd. It was a good movie going experience. Don't know it would make good viewing outside a cinema, though.
Cloud Atlas was interesting, but not as insightful as it was made out to be.
I'm kind of amazed that no one has said 'you have to watch Looper,' yet, so i'll say it: you have to watch Looper. It's the smartest time travel movie I've ever seen.
These are some of the movies that I watched and liked in 2012:
The Grey
Prometheus
The Avengers
The Dark Knight Rises
Skyfall
The Hobbit
And these are some of the good ones I would like to watch:
Argo
Lincoln
Looper
Life of Pi
Zero Dark Thirty
I'm surprised it still "misses" on a lot of phrasings and sends the search to Google which is generally useless since Google loses the context. Especially phrasings that Siri advertises as working.
"how far is it to X" doesn't work in Google but works in Siri. "how did (sports team) do" doesn't work in Google but works in Siri. "what movies are playing" works but "where is Argo playing" doesn't. And this is just weird because "where is Looper playing" works.