A couple days ago, after listing more than a few good reviews, Rande Iaboni, my colleague here at The Movie Banter, asked us all a bold challenge of a question: “Will you be checking [Looper] out?” Briefly, for those of you who don’t know, Looper is the latest film from the brilliant, poetic mind of Rian Johnson. Only his third feature film to date Looper not only promised to be a movie unlike anything Johnson had ever done before, but also one that no one else had either. His first two films, the alliterative Brick and Brothers Bloom, fall into the high school film noir and romantic, stylized heist categories, respectively. To define Looper, however, would be a difficult, if not impossible, task. Wholly sci-fi with bits of film noir, melodrama, thriller, horror, and heist genres throw into the mix, Looper’s plot is just as hard to define as its genre. The trailer promised a future world where time travel is more than a possibility; in fact, it is taken over by the mob as a means of killing people in the past before they’ve ever existed in the future. But what happens when the person you’ve been instructed to kill is the future version of yourself? Sounds a little elusive? Well, with a cast made up of Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, and Jeff Daniels, it could certainly afford to be.

And so, knowing all of that–which really amounts to knowing not much of anything at all–last night I headed to the midnight opening-showing of Looper and answered Iaboni’s question with a resounding, “Yes!”

Yes, I would see Looper, did see it in fact. And how did I like it? I thought it was great. It was honestly unlike anything I had ever seen before. Yes, there were strong elements of homage, most notably to the Terminator series, but even so, Johnson took those elements and made them his own.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had as many “WHAAAAT?!” moments before in a movie as I had in the theater watching Looper. Most things were completely unexpected and perfectly intertwined. Even now, though, knowing all the twists doesn’t detract from Looper. Rather, while the twists definitely add something to Looper, it doesn’t make the movie like so many others before it–Looper makes use of the twists without relying upon them.

I don’t know what bigger praise to give Looper except to say that in the current state of tired, trite films the make up Hollywood, Johnson has given us a movie so undefinable it remains difficult to explain even now. Well, that, and the cast wasn’t half bad either.

SEE IT. (If not for my rave review than to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s face transformation into a young Bruce Willis. That was just crazy.)