I liked this movie reasonably well — it’s a Rian Johnson movie, which means it’s well-crafted. It’s got a good story with interesting characters. It’s a science fiction film set in a near-future setting that’s believably semi-dystopian (though it’s not clear to me if that’s just a “we’re seeing the seedy side of life because of the characters we’re following” thing or if it’s meant to be worse; I think the former). My overall impressions of the movie are basically positive, and I would recommend it lightly (though also think that Johnson has gotten better since this).

And I say all that, because what I want to talk about are two big problems with the movie. These aren’t really movie-ruining problems to me (though the first probably will be for some), but I also found them impossible to ignore. So, they are:

  1. It’s a time travel movie that fundamentally doesn’t make sense, but the story is premised on it making sense.

  2. They got the makeup backwards.

To the first one, it’s possible to make a time travel movie that does make a sort of sense — you can do a multiverse thing or a “no changes allowed” thing, right. But both of those are narratively unsatisfying in some ways: The former implies that nothing matters, because everything happens every way; the second implies that nothing matters, because everything had to happen the way it did. It’s possible to make good movies in those modes — Avengers: Endgame did it, as did 12 Monkeys — but it requires some misdirection, and doesn’t let you tell all the stories you might want to tell about time travel.

And so the story Rian Johnson wanted to tell is one that requires a mutable, yet somehow one-true, past. Johnson tries to handwave past this to make clear to the audience that they shouldn’t think too hard about time travel logic, but the problem is, every big dramatic moment in the plot requires you to think about it, because it’s the movie’s time travel logic that ends up driving the character motivations and conflicts. It takes a lot of deliberate working with the filmmaker to look past this, much more than a movie can reasonably require.

To the second problem, fundamentally, they’re trying to convince us that Bruce Willis is an old Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Those two actors don’t look the same. So they put Gordon-Levitt into a kind of weird young Bruce Willis-esque makeup job. But this is a total mistake, and what they should have done is put Bruce Willis into old-JGL makeup. Why? Two reasons.

First, we know what young Bruce Willis looked like. We were there for his early career. Maybe JGL looks like a person who could plausibly age into Bruce Willis, but we know what Bruce Willis actually looked like at that age — he was in Moonlighting, and JGL doesn’t look anything like Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis. Because of that, I actually didn’t even realize what they were going for at first with the makeup job — I thought they were doing some kind of de-aging thing on him, and was trying to figure out why you’d need to de-age the “young” version of your character. If you reverse the makeup, we don’t yet know what old JGL will look like, so all you need to do is make something plausible, and we’ll buy it.

Second, JGL is the protagonist of the movie. Oh, Willis is in it, and he drives some story beats and all, but JGL is the real core character who we spend the most time with and who has to do all the subtle emoting. Putting him in weird makeup is a hindrance to that in a way that it wouldn’t be a hindrance to have Willis in makeup for his mostly-action scenes. (As far as I can tell, Willis wasn’t suffering from aphasia yet when this movie was filmed, but he has very few lines.)

Really, if it weren’t that the movie needed a movie star name on it for financial reasons, I think it would have been better with an unknown actor in the Willis role. Someone who looked more like JGL and who could sell their complicated relationship better would have made it click. Or heck, put JGL in makeup in the old-him role; I have to assume that was rejected intentionally, but I think it would have worked better.

Anyway, that’s a lot of talk about the problems of the movie, but end of the day, it’s an enjoyable-enough story, even if it’s not a patch on what Johnson is capable of now.