Once the lavish summer blockbusters are out of the way, there’s always a slice of brain-boggling sci-fi set aside to keep genre aficionados going. Writer/director Rian Johnson’s Looper reunites him with his Brick star Joseph Gordon-Levitt for a time-travelling action film also featuring Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt. The premise is that Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is a hired killer with a difference; Joe is responsible for bumping off the enemies of organized crime who are sent back from the future (2072) for execution in 2042. But when he recognises one of his potential victims as being his future self (Willis), Young Joe is forced to track down Old Joe to save himself from himself. With a plot seemingly derived from the late Chris Marker’s short La Jetée (later remade with Willis by Terry Gilliam as Twelve Monkeys), Looper adds a further layer of obfuscation to things by adding Emily Blunt as a woman with telekinetic powers. Confused? Almost certainly, but at least the trailer promises the most potent mixture of sci-fi paradox and action since Christopher Nolan’s Inception. To do so, Johnson will have to channel the style of his breakout hit Brick rather than the rote blandness of his follow-up The Brothers Bloom, but the snazzy trailer suggests an enjoyably loopy thriller.

General release from Fri 28 Sep.

LOOPER - Official Trailer - In Theaters 9/28