Loopholes: College Admission Essay Sample

“The title Looper implies time is a continuous loop, right? The future interacts with the past like it always does, because it’s meant to. So how does Bruce Willis break away from it, all of a sudden? And when he does break away, how doesn’t he mess everything up? It’s his own past he’s interfering with, his own loop of existence—”

“It’s a movie! Who cares?”

“I care!”

“Making you the only one that does, then.”

I sat there in silence for several minutes, dumbstruck. Perhaps that was the case. Perhaps I was preventing myself from suspending disbelief and fully enjoying a decent film by overthinking it (“it’s not real; it’s not supposed to make sense”). Perhaps I was simply a ‘hater,’ looking to nitpick something that everyone else seemed to enjoy (“it has a 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes; it must be good”).

But then it occurred to me: What would happen if I and everyone else on the planet decided to enjoy all movies at face value? How many more impossible, contradictory, headache-inducing time travel films would be produced if this one went uncriticized?

My critical disposition has always been my defining trait, my most valuable identifier (even though many would consider it to be rooted in cynicism). I look for the best and the worst in everything I can, from films, to books, to people, to politics—I draw my own conclusions, opposed to blindly accepting those of others. And though criticism has undoubtedly become something dirty or elitist in the eyes of the masses, it is an integral component to intellectual growth and development. Without it, society would remain stuck in the past, trapped in a continuous loop that really only Bruce Willis should be subjected to.

My dissecting of the pseudoscience in Looper is more than just my neurotic love of accuracy—it is my innate desire to not only understand what I find wrong with the world, but to improve upon it. This is who I am: someone who will never be satisfied until I see that all is well.