The cost of intervention
LOOPERS
Director: Rian Johnson
Cert: 15
Running time: 118 minutes
Don’t go to the future. It’s not a nice place.
Well, not if the vision of 40 years hence in the recently released Looper is anything to go by. There’s grunge and more grunge. There are hover bikes too, although people are still driving rusty Honda Civics, albeit with a retro-fitted solar engine attached.
Oh, and they’ve invented time travel. In 2044 we have people being sent back through time from the 2070s to be assassinated by trained killers known as ‘Loopers’. Why? Well, if you’re a mob boss and you want to hide a body, where better than 30 years ago where no one can find it?
Our Looper, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is content with his lot until he has to ‘close his loop’ by killing his future self, played by Bruce Willis. Unfortunately, Bruce is on a mission and goes on the run, trying to stop future devastation by altering events in the past.
Philosophical dilemma
So far, so Terminator, but it raises a familiar philosophical dilemma: if we had the opportunity to go into the past and stop a Hitler or a Stalin, would we? Actually, why stop with Stalin and Hitler? Why not try to prevent every major conflict or abuse of innocence? Of course, this would be an unenviable, unending task. And it’s intriguing that many of us, more likely than not, would refuse to intervene. Partly because we wouldn’t want our action to incur other ramifications, and partly because we don’t fully trust our own virtue or judgments.
No one gets to play God but God, and, well, he doesn’t play at it. And is one of the reasons why God doesn’t directly intervene in every instance of suffering because there would be no end to intervention? That inevitably we end up with the flood solution — that the only way to stop all human suffering is to do away with humanity?
Thank Christ that his death and resurrection demonstrate another solution. That one supreme judgment, one cosmic-scale intervention, sent ripples through past, present and future in such a way that all violence and suffering will one day be done away with.
And praise God that we get to intervene by proclaiming and being his good news. We don’t need a time machine to change the future for the better. We just need the gospel.
Jason Gardner,
youth pastor, St. Peter’s, West Harrow — @Gardnerblurb
