Looper – A Brief History of Time Travel

It might be hard to believe, but the uptight movie geek that I am doesn’t hate all movies that involve time travel. I mean, time travel does turn my try-to-find-plot-holes dial to eleven, but I’m much more forgiving than I usually am (or even should be) when I notice time-related oddities. Nobody can get time travel right, so I might as well just enjoy just how wrong it can get. And it’s a good thing, because otherwise, there is no way I could have even tolerated Looper all the way through.

I don’t know how I should talk about it, because I actually liked Looper, but GOD DAMN does it get time travel wrong. So I guess I’ll just have a short disclaimer: I will talk shit about Looper, but I think it’s an alright movie. I will also probably spoil the shit out of it, but it’s pretty predictable, so no biggie.

One of the things that annoyed me the most is that time travel, in the context of the movie, was used in an extremely contrived and plot-convenient way. I managed to stop myself from thinking about it too much after a while, but after the movie, all the questions that I had been pushing down came rushing back to the surface.

Like, if the reason people in 2070 have to send people back in time to get murdered is because they can’t get rid of the body, why don’t they just send the dead bodies in the past? Either just send the bodies to 10 000 BC and nobody will notice, or if you can’t go that far back in time, still zap them to 2040, but if they’re dead, at least you won’t get loopers who refuse to kill their future self. Actually, why do they even ask the loopers to kill themselves?

How can murder be practically impossible in a world where the mob seems to be the most powerful entity in the world?

What kind of world can the future be where it’s more practical to kidnap people to send them back in time 30 years than fake an accident? Seriously, I’m sure they could have just invited Bruce Willis to go rock climbing and then OOPS BRUCE YOUR ROPE BROKE OH NO… And before you say that it would get suspicious that all the enemies of the mob get invited to go karting and then disappear, realize that they’re already getting kidnapped, just throw them down a waterfall in a canoe, should still be simpler than kidnapping them and sending their beaten, hooded, tied-up body back in time to be shot in the face.

If the police of the future is so good at cracking down on murderers, why do they suck so much at catching time travellers, a crime that is, acording to the movie, very illegal (which is more illegal than most crimes)?

But I don’t mind those things that much. They’re not really plot holes, they’re just things that aren’t explained in the confines of the movie. Maybe there’s a perfectly valid explanation for all of those points I raised, but the movie knows it doesn’t have to explain them, so it doesn’t, and it’s fine. Even more than fine, because the movie actually goes out of its way to tell you how irrelevant the explanation would be, when Gordon-Levitt’s character explains why they can’t dispose of bodies in the future with something along the lines of “Some kind of chip or whatever…”

The same goes for the flaky time travel mechanics. There are number of schools regarding time travel and its effects on reality. The Back to the Future school that teaches that changes in the past affect the present gradually, like a ripple in a pond. There’s the Star Trek reboot school, that teaches that going back in time creates another universe entirely. There’s the 12 Monkeys school, that teaches that anything that will happen has already happened and that you cannot change anything. There are more, I’m sure, but they’re the 3 most distinct that I know of, and I usually class movies somewhere inside one of those 3 groups.

Looper, however, doesn’t really stick with one and instead goes from one to the other depending on what helps the plot move along. I’d say most of it follows the Back in the Future idea, what with the scars and cut fingers appearing (or disappearing) on the characters’ future selves, or the new memories being propagated from Gordon-Levitt to Willis, but there are moments that definitely don’t adhere to this rule, the most obvious of them being the ending, when the movie implies that Willis changing the past actually made the Rainmaker what he becomes, making the timeline a fixed, unchangeable one in which Willis has always escaped Gordon-Levitt in the past (which, the movie showed us, is not true), and then, seconds later, implying that Gordon-Levitt changed the timeline by killing himself.

Again, I don’t consider that a big deal; the movie itself tells us that time travel doesn’t make sense and that we should just go with it. Plus, they’re not really mistakes, they’re just oddities that make the rules of time travel hard to follow. I mean, in Back to the Future, you expect the main characters or the polaroids to slowly reflect the changes that were made in the past. In Terminator, you expect the characters to stay the same even when the past is altered. In Timecop, you expect two copies of the same person to melt into a gelatinous blob when they come in contact. Okay, maybe this one you don’t, but you get my drift; most movies set up internal rules that usually make some amount of sense, at least in the confines of the movie. Looper doesn’t, because its narrative benefits from bending its own internal rules, and I can respect sacrificing logical consistency for style.

And I have to admit, if you can forgo the kinda-sorta weak time-related stuff, Looper is pretty good. It has an interesting family (particularly fatherhood) theme going for it, it’s not insultingly dumb (outside of one thing, which I will discuss soon), it has Jeff Daniels… It’s entertaining and not retarded, and, sadly, that’s enough for me right now.

There’s one thing that struck me as incredibly dumb, though. No, it’s not Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s weird make-up, or his almost comical Bruce Willis impression.

In this future, it’s basically impossible to kill people, so much that the mob send their enemies back in time to get rid of them, but the mobsters who kidnap Willis bring guns and shoot his wife, and it really doesn’t seem like a big deal. Just to make it clear: in the process of kidnapping Willis, tying him up and sending him through time to be killed by his former self 30 years in the past because it would be too complicated to just murder him, they just murder his wife.

…

I mean, I know the mobsters were kind of surprised she was there (even though they managed to find Willis in China after 30 years), but if your first instinct when you are surprised by an unarmed woman is to shoot her, you probably shouldn’t work for the people who go to that kind of insane length to avoid actually killing people.

But yeah, other than that, it’s worth seeing!