Looper

Looper doesn't just use the idea of time travel as a convenient jump-off for a doppelgänger showdown. Neither is it just about a person's reaction to foreknowledge, and a perceived ability to steer their life in a desirable direction. Instead, Looper's system of time travel seems to have mutated society in every conceivable direction. The economy has collapsed, perhaps because of incessant future guy interference, and created a neo-depressed world in which there is an overwhelming amount of have-nots. They line the streets, gunning each other down over scraps while an entitled criminal class steer their sports cars and hover bikes around them. I think we see the Police a grand total of once - they're even less effective here than in a James Cameron film.

Everything is dreadful, and everybody hopes for escape. It's a beautiful piece of world building by writer / director Rian Johnson. He's created a system that functions on the whims of an all-powerful unseen, his greed and avarice steering humanity right into the ground. We get to see the aftershock of intruding into the past to stack the odds solely in one person's favour. This is Biff Tannen's 1985, billeted with self-policing contract killers that drop Cowboy Bebop drugs and dream of terminating themselves. The damage is done. Somebody has lost. The only hope for mankind is that in one possible future, the man who becomes Bruce Willis found it in himself to stop being a dick for five minutes and fell in love with a nice Chinese lady.

Inception

Inception is an absurdly expensive flight of fancy. Christopher Nolan's film jumps off from a big-lie idea of there being a whizz-tech powerful enough that it allows people to break into each other's dreams. We are lead slowly through sequences that establish and demonstrate the various mechanical laws that allow interlopers to dabble around in foreign subconscious. Naturally, this wonder science is used, primarily, as a tool for industrial espionage. Machine established, the film then becomes a launch-pad for weaving together a series of clashing action sequences, each one set at a distinct simulation level of the quarry's dreamscape. These action plains intersect and distend, spinning in and out of each other at a frequency close to parody. Inception invents a behavioural rule-set, premised on complete fantasy, then gleefully vandalises it. It's not in love with characters; instead it finds joy in establishing a new idea, then gleefully kicking the chair out from underneath it. Inception is, in this sense, joyous; a piece that may move with the familiar beats of the blockbuster - staffed by mission-focused experts who deal in broad, cool strokes - but isn't constrained by them. It's a heist film where everything goes wrong and these professionals have to think on their feet. Their central task quickly becoming wildly irrelevant when judged against the action of performing these feats. Along the way enough details are left nagging to undermine all of the reality we have witnessed; micro-details and spectral figments take on alarming meaning the deeper we tumble into our players.