Looper (2012)

Time travel stories are difficult to pull off well. Explain too little and you get nothing but plot holes, explain too much and it turns into technobabble. Also hard to pull off: genre films intended squarely for adults. You can quote as many "Pow! Zing! Comics Aren't For Kids Anymore!" articles you want but the fact is the majority of sci-fi, fantasy, superhero and horror movies are aimed squarely at teenagers. Which isn't to say those movies are bad or anything, but they are usually fairly shallow.

In fact, Hollywood doesn't make any movies for adults period. Besides Argo, I can't think of many studio backed movies with major release dates that were tailored for an adult and weren't comedies. Ever since Star Wars, the blockbusters are for the teens while the dramas are saved for awards season. That's fine, there's good and bad examples of both, but it can get monotonous after a while.

So it's nice to see when a movie mixes up that dynamic just a little. Looper is one of those movies. I have no idea how it ever got past pre-production, not because it's bad or so crazy to be plausible or whatnot, but because it is just not the type of movie a major Hollywood studio makes. It forces you to pay attention, is surprisingly dark, and is filmed and staged like no other sci-fi film to come out of the studio system. It's also probably one of the best films to come out last year