Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano
Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I have the strongest memory of seeing the trailer for the film in the early days of 2012 and laughing pretty hard at the whole “time travel is used for crime” and then laughing a whole lot louder at the image of Gordon-Levitt doing a Bruce Willis impression with a few pieces of prosthetic attached to him.
Then I saw the film and actually ended up liking it. Who knew?
Did I Like It: I also had almost no memories of the film in the years since. Who knew? At first, that seems like what would probably be a bad sign. I do remember thinking that my laughter about Gordon-Levitt’s casting was probably unfair. He’s doing an impression of Willis, sure, but it’s a more nuanced performanced than simply an impression and some putty glued to his face, and he fights the urge to tap into Willis’ early mannerisms in Moonlighting or Die Hard (1988).
Where does such a film go just from the pitch of a character having to assassinate himself? Those are the parts of the film that have seemed to drift away from my memory, but I should have guessed that the film would wind up where it did. How many great filmmakers of the modern age desperately wish studios would allow them to make westerns—and make no mistake, shake aside time travel and telekinesis, and this is just two black hats competing to be the more human—and have to hind them among other genres. Lucas put his outlaws and black hats in outer space, when Spielberg looked back on his influences, he couldn’t forget John Ford, and I would posit that nearly every John Carpenter film is a western, especially the horror films. One imagines that people thought Zemeckis was just cheating with Back to the Future - Part III (1990).