Director Rian Johnson knows what to do with a camera.

Every single shot is vital and perfectly designed. His visual economy is so amazing precisely because it’s so missable.

And I don’t care that the time travel element in Looper falls down (for some people) – and I don’t care for two reasons:

1. all time travel movies (except Primer) stop making sense if you think about them long enough
2. there are so many other interesting film-making choices surrounding this element that to reduce the film to simply being a broken time-travel story is to put it on par with some really, really crap films.

My favourite choice: the time travel “effect” – or lack thereof. In a world of CGI everything, Rian Johnson chooses to show time travel as a simple in-camera / editing technique – one which could have been accomplished 100 years prior. Maybe I’m not selling it, but the absence of pyrotechnics and/or overwhelming sound design makes for a deafening silence.