Looper’s experimental soundtrack slapped then, and slaps even harder now

polygon.com:

10 years ago this week, Rian Johnson’s Looper burst into theaters with the sheer ventilating force of a blunderbuss shot.

The sci-fi action-thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, which follows an assassin forced to fight a future version of himself, was a far cry from the director’s past films like Brick and The Brothers Bloom. Looper would amass such critical and commercial success that Johnson would be offered the opportunity to write and direct the second installment in Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy.

There are many things to admire when looking back on the production of Looper, like the film’s sobering depiction of a dilapidated Kansas City slouching toward the future, Gordon-Levitt and Willis’ stark yet complementary portrayals of a repentant hitman at polar-opposite ends of his life, or a surprise breakout performance by Pierce Gagnon as Cid, a strange boy harboring an even stranger secret and a keen sense of maturity and comic timing beyond his years.

A decade since the film’s debut, what stands out the most is Looper’s score, a collage of explosive and somber tracks pieced together from field recordings and eerie orchestral arrangements that combine into an experience undeniably and enduringly unique. For composer Nathan Johnson, finding the right sound for Looper meant wading through the uncertainty of organized chaos and experimentation.

“To me, it felt like stumbling around in a dark room looking for a thread that I could follow into the light,” Johnson told Polygon in an interview over Zoom. “I come much more from a melodic, thematic writing perspective when it comes to music. And Looper was just like, hours upon hours of recording crazy sounds. For the longest time, I didn’t even know if