Brick Director Time Travels in Looper

I’ve never seen Rian Johnson’s teen high school noir “Brick”, but I sure have heard good to great things about it. People who have seen it seems to really love it, which means I gotta give it a shot sooner or later. Anyways, Rian Johnson’s next movie is more in line with us, a sci-fi time-travel movie in the vein of a Philip Dick short story. Or at least that’s how the writer-director is describing it.

Johnson tells IGN:

“It’s called Looper,” Johnson said during a recent visit to the edit bay for The Brothers Bloom. “It’s sci-fi, but it’s very much — well, I think people toss out Philip Dick sci-fi when they mean ’small, dark’ sci-fi. Although, when I think of Philip Dick’s books, it’s something very different. I think people are confusing it with the movie Blade Runner.”

Johnson, who previously wrote and directed the high school-film noir hybrid Brick, explained that the film would be set in a sci-fi reality, but deal more with characters than fantastical conceits. “To me, it’s a lot more like the first Terminator,” he said. “It’s very sci-fi, but it’s very character-based and very concentrated. It’s very different from the Terminator movies, but it’s like the first Terminator in that time travel is involved with it, but only as a plot device.”

Johnson also describes his time travel movie as “really violent and dark”, which is right up our alley. I’ve always loved time travel stories in general, and the ones where the characters are more important than the whole sci fi stuff always ends up being the best of the bunch. I just hope it’s not too much like “Donnie Darko”, which was so convoluted and so in love with its pretensions as to have its head shove up its own ass by the end credits.