SF STAR WILLIS EXITS THE SCREEN

Bruce Willis as Korben Dallas, THE FIFTH ELEMENT.

Some of our screen heroes seem to last forever, like the virtually invincible Bill Shatner, 91 years old and still going strong. Others, sadly, are only impervious to harm in the movies, like the star of many a science fiction classic, Bruce Willis. We got the news this week that Willis is retiring from his acting career of just over 35 years due to a diagnosis of aphasia, or, as my dictionary defines it, the inability to understand or produce speech.

Aphasia is usually the result of brain damage caused by trauma, illness or stroke. His family has not announced details about the cause or prognosis of his condition. But it is known that he sued Revolution Studios for unspecified damages related to a blow to his forehead that he received during "ultrahazardous activity" involved in the filming of TEARS OF THE SUN in 2003. The suit claims the injury has caused him extreme mental, physical and emotional pain and suffering. Film producers and directors working with Willis on recent projects have noted he’s had difficulties remembering his lines and was disoriented onset, despite accommodations made to help him.

Whatever the cause of his decline, I’ve been a fan of Willis’s since his days playing private eye David Addison opposite Cybill Shephard in television’s Moonlighting (which ran on ABC from 1985 to 1989), the role which launched his career and garnered him an Emmy and a Golden Globe. And Willis is two years younger than I am. So this one kinda hit me hard.

Of course, even before his five-year stint on Moonlighting ended, Willis had begun his wildly successful career as an action film star with DIE HARD in 1988. That film spawned four sequels and a handful of video games, as well as being selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2017 by the United States Library of Congress as a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" film.

In the first of his collaborations with director Quentin Tarantino, Willis played an aging boxer in the pay of mob boss Ving Rhames in 1994’s PULP FICTION. He brought his trademark combination of toughness and vulnerability to the role, giving the character of Butch, in love with his air-headed girl and just trying to survive at the ignominious end of a boxing career, a pathos he might not otherwise have had. It may be hard to watch this performance now in light of Willis’s own deteriorating mental condition. The actor starred in two other Tarantino-adjacent projects, Robert Rodriguez’s SIN CITY (2005) (an adaptation of a Frank Miller graphic novel) and the Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration GRINDHOUSE/PLANET TERROR (2007), both of which featured the highly stylized cinematography, dystopian vision and over-the-top violence that is the hallmark of both directors’ grindhouse style.

For science fiction film fans like me, it’s that kind of work in our favorite genre that will live on beyond any of his other creative efforts. Several of his roles are iconic; the films themselves are cult classics; and, like SIN CITY, the stories they portray are popular across several media. Take the first of these films, 12 MONKEYS, from 1995, directed by Terry Gilliam and costarring Brad Pitt and Madeline Stowe. This story of a convict (Willis playing James Cole) sent back in time to investigate the sources of a virus that has wiped out 99 percent of the human population, garnered an Oscar nomination for Pitt, and spun off a successful television show of the same name on the Syfy Channel from 2015 to 2018.

Then there is THE FIFTH ELEMENT (1997), helmed by well-known SF director Luc Besson and costarring Gary Oldman and a host of others. The plot of this futuristic mashup is mostly nonsense (Willis plays taxi driver/former commando Korben Dallas), but the effects are a delight for the eyes and the film has become a favorite of SF fans.

The disaster/action film ARMAGEDDON from 1998 has much broader appeal, with a cast drawn from Hollywood A-listers like Willis, Ben Afleck, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton, Will Patton and others. Plus, though the plot has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese, it was written by Jonathan Hensleigh (of DIE HARD fame) and J.J. Abrams (of too many films to count) and directed by action king Michael Bay. NASA shows this film about a mission to divert a killer asteroid by drilling into it and setting off nuclear explosives to blow it to bits to its managers in training for them to spot the errors. Spoiler alert: There are a lot of them.

Willis’s next film was a complete departure from his work in action movies. As child psychologist Malcolm Crowe in M. Night Shyamalan’s THE SIXTH SENSE he is subdued, empathetic, even, as his film client (Cole Sears, played by the astounding Haley Joel Osment) notes, “sad.” But he is determined to help Cole, who “sees dead people,” even at the risk of sacrificing his troubled marriage (to an equally depressed Olivia Williams), to gain redemption for a patient who committed suicide in his home at the beginning of the film (a young and nearly unrecognizable Donnie Wahlberg). This is a great film with a twist that gets me even with repeated viewings and offers possibly Willis’s best performance ever.

That is a tough call, though, when put up against his work in another Shyamalan film, UNBREAKABLE, from 2000. I love this film for its exploration of the comic book tropes of the invincible superhero (with a key vulnerability)—in this case Willis’s character David Dunn, who is impervious to injury, but vulnerable to water—and his corresponding nemesis, Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone syndrome. The film was the first of Shyamalan’s so-called “Eastrail 177” trilogy, which includes SPLIT (2016) starring James McAvoy as serial killer Kevin Crumb, and GLASS (2019) which brings all three characters together in a grand finale. Again, Willis owns this role by underplaying it, bringing a sort of baffled “why me?” resignation to his newfound abilities, hoping to avoid notice for his good deeds.

Finally, I should mention Willis’s role in the best conception of time travel on film, 2012’s LOOPER, costarring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blount. I’ve seen dozens of films about time travel and virtually all of them gave me a headache. But LOOPER is the one film I’ve seen where a time paradox is acknowledged and resolved in a most satisfying way. Kudos to writer/director Rian Johnson for developing something that is rare in Hollywood—an original idea. Willis plays the older version of Gordon-Levitt’s time-traveling gun-for-hire character in this film and brings the proper world-weariness to the role.

After GLASS in 2019, Willis continued to work at a frenetic pace, but in mostly B-grade actioners, voiceover work, shorts and cameos. He made nine films in 2021, none of them of any particular note, one of them so bad it was worthy of a special Razzy Award (which has since been withdrawn due to his disability). Despite his problems, he has completed eight more films for release later this year and next.

Bruce Willis has created an incredible body of work over a relatively short career. Maybe he just has an impressive work ethic. Or maybe something was pushing him to produce as much as he could before Fate took a hand. In any case, those of us who love the movies—especially science fiction movies—will be the ones who benefit. Thank you, Bruce, for all you have given us.

Cheers, Donna

 

 

ONE FILM CLOSES LOOP ON TIME TRAVEL

Jim Kirk once famously said, “Time travel gives me a headache!” The captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise isn’t alone. Since H.G. Wells invented The Time Machine, authors great and small have taken on the challenge of throwing their characters backward or forward in time, wrestling with time paradoxes and inconsistencies until they and their readers reach for the extra-strength Excedrin.

Filmmakers, too, just can’t seem to resist the challenge and the heartbreak of the time travel story (and particularly, the time travel romance—The Time Traveler’s Wife, Time After Time, etc.). Their failures are too numerous to mention, but when someone actually gets it right, the many Grade-Z horrors just fade from memory, angels sing and all seems suddenly right with the universe.

Such is the case with LOOPER, certainly the best science fiction film to grace the movie screens yet this year. We’ve had few to choose from, true, but this one has what so few so-called SF films these days offer—something to think about when you walk out the theater door. The characters—or is it character?—have choices to make that, of course, since it’s a time travel story, affect the timeline. And writer/director Rian Johnson (BRICK, THE BROTHERS BLOOM) leaves us guessing until the very last second as to what those choices will be.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (most recently PREMIUM RUSH and 50/50, but who could forget him as the adolescent alien in television’s THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN?) is Joe, the looper of the title, a hitman in the year 2044, assigned to kill the bound and hooded victims sent to him from his gangster bosses in the year 2074, when time travel has been discovered (and made illegal). The victims appear in a cornfield, Joe shoots them, takes the silver straps to their backs in payment and disposes of the bodies, all nice and neat.

(Okay, I admit the use of a time machine to dispose of murder victims seems excessive, but just go with the flow here. The future’s future is a grim place evidently, but it’s tough to get rid of a body.)

Eventually, every looper knows, a victim will show up bearing gold bars on his back. That will indicate it is time to “close the loop”, meaning the looper’s services are no longer needed. The victim will be the looper’s older (future) self. Since the victims are hooded when they show up, they’re usually dead before the looper sees the gold. Oh, well. Take the gold bars, live the next thirty years in peace and prosperity. God bless.

Except lately, lots more victims have been showing up with gold bars, lots more loops have been closing. Rumors go around about someone in the future called “the Rainmaker”, who is getting rid of all the loopers because of some personal vendetta. Joe shrugs it off until his own best bud, Seth, refuses to close the loop and is brutally hunted, tortured and killed by his fellow loopers.

So far the story is fairly straightforward, but this is time travel, so things commence to get weird right about now. In timeline A, Joe’s old self shows up in the cornfield, bound and hooded as always, Young Joe closes the loop and takes the gold and time progresses. We see Young Joe travel the world, work various bodyguarding/crime jobs and so on until he ages into Bruce Willis and settles down with a lovely Asian woman somewhere off the beaten path. He is happy and content.

One day, however, the big bosses find him to close the loop. They kill his wife and send him through the time machine to the cornfield—with one difference. He fights them, and manages to pull the hood off, so that when he arrives, Young Joe sees his face. He has that moment of surprise to turn his back and take the gun blast in the gold bars strapped to his back. Plus, of course, he has skills. So he escapes.

Thus begins Timeline B, in which Young Joe and Old Joe occupy the same time and space. Now, normally this would not be possible, according to most time-travel theories, but, hey, by this time, I’m enjoying the show and really don’t care. Gordon-Levitt and Willis are absolutely magnetic on the screen, both separately and together. Writer/director Johnson has made us care about Joe, both as a young man and as his older counterpart, and it is fun watching the two selves interact. At this moment in the film, the technical aspects of the “science” become much less important than the relational aspects of the “fiction”, as they should be, in my mind. We get caught up in the story and just want to know what happens next.

Everything that has come before has been the set-up for the moral dilemma of the final act of the film. Old Joe is looking for a young boy who will grow up to be the Rainmaker, the man who will order his death and be responsible for the death of his wife. The Rainmaker is a psychopath; there’s plenty of evidence for it, and Old Joe feels justified in killing this child before he has a chance to grow to adulthood. (If you could go back in time and kill Hitler in his crib, would you do it?)

Yet Young Joe has seen that the child, being raised by his mother on an isolated farm, has the capacity for love and remorse as well as the power to do harm with his extraordinary telekinetic talents. The final scene sets the stage for a tragedy that will determine everyone’s future—or a solution that will alter it. One man’s choice changes not only his own life, but also the lives of many others.

I won’t give away the final moments here, but I must say Johnson’s escape from this time-travel trap is both satisfying and believable. I could forgive him any lapses in consistency earlier on just because of this neat wrap-up. In fact, we could use a few more of this kind of SF films in an era when special effects so often overrule the story. It’s kinda nice to have something to think about on the way home.

Cheers, Donna