Eight best time-travel flicks

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 14:30:00 +0000

Film critics and the social media grapevine are gushing about recent cinematic release "Looper." I won't be quoting any of these reviews thanks to a tweet by the New York Times Magazine's Adam Sternbergh, which warns us off of them: "I'm generally not super-spoiler-averse but Looper is worth going into as blind as possible (beyond what's in the trailer). It pays off."

I am spoiler-averse, so instead, the barest summation of the trailer: time travel is illegal in the future, but a mafia-esque organization hires a hitman (Joseph Gordon Levitt) in 2078 to eliminate all the foes they send back in time. All goes swimmingly until one day the kneeling man who materializes before him is...himself, older, in the form of a weathered Bruce Willis. What does it mean? Who sent him? What did he do? The shit hits the fan, or at least the future collides with the past, and it looks like at some point a bullet might hit a body, too. Check it out:

Pick of the week: A tough, smart time-travel thriller

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If there’s any consensus to be drawn about the future from recent trends in science-fiction movies, it’s that it doesn’t seem worth waiting around for. The idea that the future will suck incalculably worse than the present did not begin with “The Hunger Games,” of course. It goes back at least as far as the Cold War and the A-bomb. (It’s not as if the dystopian vision was brand-new then, either – Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” was published in 1932.) Authors, screenwriters and directors are always future-casting based on the most visible present-tense trends, which is no doubt why the chaotic years from the late ‘60s through the early ‘80s produced so many memorable futuristic nightmares, from “Planet of the Apes” to “Soylent Green” to “Escape From New York.”

Salon.com > Looper

Eight best time-travel flicks

Pick of the week: A tough, smart time-travel thriller