Looper (spoilers galore)

To start off, I'll pick one of the movies I watched recently. Ever since I first heard about Looper, I was excited to see a time travel movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, especially with Bruce Willis in the cast. I was a little skeptical about the plot, but I figured that it would all shake out in the end, and the movie would be amazing.

But I didn't see it for quite a while. I saw people mentioning it, saying it was a really great movie. I was starting to like Joseph Gordon-Levitt after rewatching Inception, seeing that he was in The Dark Knight Rises, and watching 50/50 (which was a good movie). I thought it would be okay if I just waited for it to go to video first, though, before seeing it.

And what a great decision that was!

Let me just say this: I love time travel movies. Time travel has got to be my favorite plot device...and my favorite science fiction topic. The tragedy, however, is that very few filmmakers use it correctly. And that's not to say that I want them to hold to one specific theory of time travel (like quantum mechanics, which is my personal favorite as far as which one is probably true). I just want films to be consistent in which method they use. Looper is not.

The logic of Looper, which Bruce Willis's part of the main character doesn't want to discuss, is that if any changes are made when traveling back in time, they revise the course of events such that the future will automatically feel the effects. This is pointed to when Joe's friend lets his loop run, and they cut directions into the past guy's arm, so the future him will interpret this as a message from his past self. When the future guy gets to the spot, they start torturing his past self, so that his future self will be weakened when he arrives, and they can kill him.

Seems clever at first. The problem, of course, is that this new version of this guy will already know that it's a trap, and so his future self should know as well. Why doesn't he? Oh yeah, because the past is "blurry" when it's changed. I could try to overlook this. Except for the fact that the future self is weakened. If 30 years go past, wouldn't he have some work done to improve upon his physical well-being? And wouldn't that damage make it impossible for his future self to have run away in the first place?

It was about this time that I realized a glaring hole in the plot. The whole point of the Looper system is to dispose of bodies in the past, because it is nearly impossible to do this in the future. However, when Joe's future self is explaining what happened to him before he went into the past, he describes how the mafia killed his wife...in the future. The place where they don't want to kill people. Huh? The only explanation I can come up with for this is that they will send her body back in time to be disposed of. But if they can do that...why don't they do that for everyone they want dead? Instead of risking people running around screwing up the past, they could just kill them in the future and have them sent back into the furnace, or at least nearby so the Looper just shovels them in or something.

Once I thought of this, the rest of the movie just felt pointless. And the end? Oh, sure, Joe sacrifices himself to stop the Rain Maker from becoming such a bad guy...except that the scenario he cooks up can't be the reason the Rain Maker is what he is. Originally, he had no interaction with the kid, and yet he turned out to be evil. His going back in time would've started the thing that made him go back in time. Paradox. Even that would be okay if they actually pointed it out.

Instead, they make things worse by having his past self commit suicide. This, my friends, is the worst thing he could've done. Now, none of what his future self has done will occur. Meaning none of this movie occurred. (hmm...maybe this the best eventuality then...except that the filmmakers fail to see that this is the proper course of events). Of course, they decided to go along with it anyway, and everything future Joe did is still there...which, by the movie's logic, it shouldn't.

There are countless other problems with this movie (the 30-second steak, for instance), but it really doesn't deserve much more discussion. If you want to see some other problems, just look up Cinema Sins's video, "Everything Wrong with Looper in 3 Minutes or Less." There are some pointless ones in there, and I want to address some of the things they don't seem to comprehend in regards to The Dark Knight Rises, but I'd say they're a good gauge of how bad a movie really is at following logic...and Looper fails their test horribly.

Though there is another way of looking at that ending. Maybe now time should revert to when the original Joe shot his future self...leading to the Bruce Willis timeline, and creating...a loop. Wow. Y'know, that would actually make some sense. If they just fixed the mafia bit, this could work...

Wait, no...because the mafia is too stupid not to realize that forcing someone to kill their future self is ridiculous. If I had to do that, I would just take the gold and split it with my future self, running away from the mafia thanks to my future self's superior knowledge of them. Better yet, I could pretend I had killed my future self, then run away with him. Peaceful life, looping forever.

Edit: My father has recently pointed out that it is possible for the mafia to track the future self, hence they know when the Loop is running. So you can disregard that last bit. I might still try to evade them with future knowledge, though. Perhaps tamper with their tracking equipment so they can't find him?