Looper: Close Knit Time Travel

What better way to start of the new year than with a review of a fine time travel movie - Looper, which came out this past Fall.  I almost never dislike a time travel movie, so to say I liked Looper is no big deal.  But I more than liked it, and think it's a minor classic in what I think of as the close-knit time travel subgenre.

Big throttle time travel movies entail stopping an event - or trying to stop it - that literally destroys or shakes up the world.  12 Monkeys, the best time travel movie ever made, in my opinion - and also starring Bruce Willis, the big name star of Looper - does this end-of-the-world business par excellence. Source Code and Deja Vu don't involve apocalypse, but the time traveler strives to prevent events that would kill lots of people.

Close-knit time travel movies focus more on human relationships.   The Time Traveler's Wife is a strong example, as is The Butterfly Effect, and, for that matter, Peggy Sue Got Married.  Looper would be on the violent end of this realm - people get killed, and crime abounds, but the heart and soul of the story, as we're correctly told in the last scene, is love, of husband for wife, and mother for son.

The set-up is a 2072 world in which the mob has to find a better way of killing people, because bodies and their histories are too easily traced.   The fortunate invention of time traveling provides a solution - send the body back in time 30 years, where it can be killed, and nobody in the future will be the wiser.  The only loose ends are the killers 30 years in the past.  As they grow older, they provide a growing cadre of witnesses to the mob boss's executions.  But there's a solution to this problem, too:  when the killers get older, send them back so their younger killing selves can kill the older version.  Why would the youngos do this?  Their older versions are sent back with a ton of money, which allow the young killers to live high on the hog for 30 years.   Given the impetuousness of youth, it's a safe bet that this system is working.

But not that safe, and Looper tells the story of what happens when the older version of the killer - Old Joe - breaks free of the death cycle,  and comes to see that the best way of staying alive and saving his beloved wife is to kill the mob boss and end the whole insane business.   This requires meetings between Old Joe and Young Joe, and we get some good time travel epistemology here. Old Joe knows that his very meeting with Young Joe will change who Old Joe is and what he remembers.   In an excellent scene, he explains that all of his memories are now fuzzy, because they're in jeopardy of being erased or replaced by the interaction of the two Joes, and they become clear only at the moment that young Joe actually does something.

That kind of carefully plotted time travel reasoning always wins me over, and shows that the movie is worth watching.   The resolution of the movie is heart-rending but also in good logical shape in the way the future is changed so it does not have a Murder, Inc across time.

Of course, as is the case with all things time travel - and its most endearing quality, I'd say - there is and can be no ultimately satisfactory resolution.  Because if the sending of people back in time to be killed is stopped, then there would be no old or young Joe, because there would be no looping killers, and therefore no movie.   But, hey, this can't be helped when you jump onto the horns of paradox.

Meanwhile, on the acting ledger - Bruce Willis is ok, Piper Perabo (of Covert Affairs) is ok too, but it was little Pierce Gagnon who just stole the show.



Praise for the novel...

"...challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"...a fun book to read" - Dallas Morning News

"resonates with the current political climate . . . . heroine Sierra Waters is sexy as hell . . . . there's a bite to Levinson's wit" - Brian Charles Clark, Curled Up With A Good Book at curledup.com 

"a journey through time that'll make you think as it thrills ... so accessible, even those generally put off by sci-fi should enjoy the trip." - Rod Lott, bookgasm.com

"Levinson spins a fascinating tale ... An intriguing premise with believable characters and attention to period detail make this an outstanding choice... Highly recommended." - Library Journal,*starred review

"Light, engaging time-travel yarn . . . neatly satisfies the circularity inherent in time travel, whose paradoxes Levinson links to Greek philosophy." - Publishers Weekly

"A thinking person's time travel story... I felt like I was there." - SF Signal

Covert Affairs 1.7: Amtrak Split

Keeping an eye on Covert Affairs, the stylish, James Bondian, Aliasesque new spy series on the USA Network.   Episode 1.7, on last night, struck a chord with me - I'm always on the lookout for a good story whose resolution hinges on a train (probably because of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train or North by Northwest, who knows).

Last night's story featured Auggie (good work by Christopher Gorham) - blind, cool, accomplished colleague of Annie at the CIA - though there was plenty of attractive Annie, and Jai (Sendhil Ramamurthy - from Heroes!), too!   Auggie has to reconnect with a former lover, another beauty, who's a master hacker.  She's attracted everyone's attention by bringing down the power grid for a brief period of time in Washington.   Everyone means not only ours but the Russian spy agency - Natasha is Russian - and throw in our own organized crime guys as well.

Lots of good scenes and action, but, to get back to my love of trains in fiction (I also love riding Amtrak in real life, too), the best part of the night had Auggie and Natasha undertaking an escape from New York to the north via Amtrak.  (Auggie has fallen back in love with Natasha.)  He fakes out most of the pursuing spies and bad guys by taking advantage of the Albany, NY station, where trains to the north can split and go due north to Montreal, or north by northwest to Toronto.   I can't recall the last time I saw a show on television utilize such good knowledge of the train system.

Hey, I like the Amtrak northern routes so much that I had my forensic detective, Dr. Phil D'Amato, take the Lake Shore Limited in my 2002 novel, The Consciousness Plague.   There's something about trains - the way they move, the fleeting community of people aboard - that makes them ideal vehicles for fiction.

Like Covert Affairs, they're smooth, fast, and chock full of atmosphere.

See also Covert Affairs on USA Network



5-min podcast review of Covert Affairs

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Covert Affairs on USA Network

Covert Affairs checked in with a strong pilot on the USA Network last night.   The series stars Piper Perabo - said to be the new Julia Roberts - as new CIA agent Annie Walker.  She does have a lot of Julia Roberts, her beauty and smile, and also something of Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow in Alias, one of my all-time favorite series due to its Chinese box-in-a-box complexity and style.   Bourne Identity producer Doug Liman is producing Covert Affairs, so it also has a lot of the style and pace of that fine movie, too.

The pilot had car chases and pursuits on foot you don't often see with such power and speed on television.   The plot had some good twists and supporting acting, including Anne Dudek (best seen on House) who plays Annie's older sister, Kari Matchett (best seen, at least in my view, on ABC's Invasion a few years ago) who plays Annie's boss, and even Clarke Peters (The Wire, Treme) as Annie's professor.   Christopher Gorham as Auggie Anderson, Annie's bright, young, blind colleague was also pretty good, and the character is refreshing.  No blind detective on television has been as compelling as Longstreet, from back in the 1970s, so it will be interesting to follow Auggie's role on the show.

As Auggie tells Annie early on, the CIA lifted its hiring freeze after September 11, so most of the people at Langley are new hires and young.    They're also often involved with each other - Kari Matchett is problematically married to Peter Gallagher's character, head of Annie's division - because that way secrets can (usually) be kept a little safer, at least not likely to be divulged to a reporter or worse, an enemy agent, during pillow talk.    We'll no doubt see that proposition sorely tested during the series.

Annie's heart was broken right before she joined up - and that was indeed her motive for becoming an agent - but the guy is still watching over her, stalking her, who knows about his ultimate intentions.

More than enough story, color, and action to keep me watching.

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book