what could that mean, i wonder
Well, Mr. Plus Two, welcome to the board.
Maybe, but it’s the good half.
I was underwhelmed. I won’t talk much about the TK centered plot point in the film, but I can think of more interesting things they could have done w/ the ‘reign man’. For now, I’ll just say that in terms of a Bruce Willis character either breaking, or completing a time loop, the other loop… the one w/ all those monkeys, felt more impactful than Looper.
Also couldn’t figure out why they would doctor up Joseph Gordon Levitt for this role. Hey guess what, I know what Bruce Willis looked like when he was much younger, and it wasn’t anything like JGL looked like in this flick. It was distracting.
Probably fewer plot holes than Triangle, but I’ve had too much alcohol and Rock Band to say more. Liked it, but not the movie I expected.
I liked it a lot,and I thought there was more to it than the trailer.
Much better than The Master which I saw the same day.
Saw it on a whim with my wife last night. This was surprisingly good, certainly better than a lot of movies I saw this year that were just flat out awful. Granted, there’s not a lot to the plot, but it’s different enough to keep most people guessing. Bonus points for a really creative use for time travel that will stick in people’s minds for a long time.
I don’t know what we’re cool with “spoiling” so far, so look out! I’m not going to spoil any specific plot elements, but if you really want to go in with no expectations, you probably don’t want to know what elements did and didn’t work for me either. Go read another thread!
So the more I think about it, the time travel mechanics don’t really hold up to much scrutiny at all. Certainly not as much as Primer (to the extent that I understood it), but Looper wasn’t about time travel in the same way Primer was. It was just the framework for a movie about Joe, his decisions and their consequences. It even felt like a fairly direct instruction to the audience to not really worry about it when old Joe is reluctant to get into details with young Joe about how the time travel stuff really works. And yet I’m still having trouble letting it off the hook. Maybe when more people have seen it someone can explain away my reservations.
For now, I like it, but I’m not sure I love it.
SPOILERS
I tried to ignore the Time Travel logistics for the reason you quoted above. Still, the effect on future Paul Dano’s character of events that transpired in ‘current’ time really, really required me to turn my brain off. Looked good on film I guess.
Saw this in the weekend. I tend to forgive plot holes in time travel movies so I thought it was excellent.
Everyone in the movie was very good.
The trailer does a very good job of making the movie look excellent without spoiling any of the key elements.
Exactly, definitely a glaring inconsistency. In the moment it’s sort of a cool, horrific, idea, but it holds up to no scrutiny.
That was a really fantastic movie.
It’s one thing to ignore time travel logic problems (and the writer/director pretty much insists we do by having Old Joe scream at the audience that we’re not going to get into some big discussion about the ramifications of time travel), it’s another to have to ignore the most glaring: why didn’t the future thugs simply kill their targets and send the bodies back in time for disposal? Problem solved.
Anyway, try as he might, Johnson, like every other person attempting to tell a time travel story, can’t avoid dealing with it and as a result the basics of good storytelling are neglected. Hence, we get hackneyed techniques like foreshadowing used as a brick, smashed into our faces again and again.
Eh. He gives good answers to meaningless questions (who cares about the nano-science technical reasons murder is hard in the future, it’s just a conceit to set the story and isn’t contradicting anything or hurting things to leave unexplained) and meaningless answers to good questions (the Seth problem).
Saw it yesterday and while I enjoyed it, I still felt a bit disappointed.
I’m a huge fan of Brick. That movie came out of nowhere and I only attended a matinee after hearing good things about it. I then promptly dragged a few friends to it the very next week because I was so in love with the dialog and the quirky direction. I’ve seen the film probably about 4 or 5 times in total over the years since it came out.
The Brothers Bloom (Johnson’s next film) was also quite good imho. While no Brick, it was still very entertaining.
So I was definitely going into Looper with an open mind. And with that disclaimer in place, it’s time for spoilers
SPOILERS***************************************************
I loved the opening of the film, the introduction of the characters, and the odd future world Rian created for his characters to inhabit. Sure, there are some odd bits that didn’t make a lot of sense, but hey…it’s a time travel film. It comes with the territory. Besides, time travel is just a way to get to the meat of the story and presents us with the conflict we need to create the requisite tension in the film. As long as it wasn’t laughable (which I don’t think it was), I was good with it.
When Willis started killing the kids in order to save his future, that’s when the movie changed its tone…and in a good way, I thought. The torture he was going through over his actions was a great moral dilemma that he conveyed quite well. When he broke down outside the first victim’s home, it was a gut wrenching scene.
But then the movie shifts from one type of movie to another without so much as a “hey, we’re going to ape The Matrix now, so hang on!” The introduction of Baby Neo came out of left field (yes, I know they made a point of showing us the TK’s in the opening moments of the film…but there was NO indication that the mutations were making any evolutionary jump like that in Baby Neo) and for me, it watered down the film’s story. It just felt…tacked on. It didn’t feel organic to the story that Rian seemed to be telling in the first half of the film.
As I said, I still enjoyed it…but I believe it’s his weakest film so far.
SPOILERS************************
Willis, JGL et-al were essentially remorseless, murdering jerks. It would’ve been a more interesting character dilemma if the ultimate reveal of this future Rain/Reign-man wasn’t as an evil TK supervillain, but as someone closing all the time loops and purging the world of all the syndicate killers.
I think that’s what he was. He was purging the world of the people who were responsible for his mom’s death (and his synthetic jaw - FORESHADOWING!).
i thought it would be fun to drag this explanation of Looper’s ruleset into the discussion for anyone who has lingering questions about its logistics, just before the discussion moves over to the podcast thread forever
everything fell into place for what i gathered from seeing the film originally, and this person seems to have laid everything out in a way that people understand
CONTINUING WITH BIG SPOILERS
Some of his language and diagrams are hard to follow, but it as far as I can tell, it doesn’t address an inconsistency between Seth and Joe. It’s admittedly hard to communicate clearly, so I might not do any better, but here goes:
In our “present”, to coerce Old Seth into turning himself in, they start hacking up Young Seth. As I understand it, this fits with the explanation offered in your link. The amputations are happening in what is, in a way, Old Seth’s past, but they’re not happening to him until the moment they’re happening to Young Seth since they’re currently sharing a timeline. I can buy this, and you really have to buy this, as it’s the only way it makes sense that when they start getting severe, like cutting off Young Seth’s legs, Old Seth doesn’t get completely “re-written” out of his current actions. It’s why he just starts losing limbs where he stands (so to speak), instead of being somehow yanked or shifted back into a history where he obviously never could have run for it in the first place without feet (or sing without a tongue) when Young Seth’s first supposed to kill him.
But that doesn’t line up with Old Joe. Initially he’s treated the same way, the “BEATRIX” message unfolds the same way the message on Old Seth did. But in the end when Young Joe shoots himself, Old Joe should just drop where he stands, because like Old Seth, the event that takes place in his “past” is only just now, in the film’s present, having an effect. It should kill Old Joe, but it shouldn’t wipe Old Joe or his actions from the current timeline. There should be a body, but instead Old Joe vanishes, like he was never here.
So, first of all, I’m open to someone disputing that interpretation or explaining something I missed. That link above doesn’t seem to address it though.
If we agree—or at least, if you fail to change my mind—I’m still willing to grant that it’s sort of a minor nitpick. It bothered me more when it first occurred to me because I presented the same inconsistency to myself from the opposite perspective: If killing Young Joe causes Old Joe to not just die, but to vanish because being dead precluded everything Old Joe just did in our “present”, then cutting off Young Seth’s legs should have similarly precluded Old Seth’s escape entirely (at the very least, if not drastically altering his future to the point that he’s never even sent back).
Looking at Old Joe as the way it should be, it undercuts one of the movie’s more gruesome but cool ideas with Old Seth, so that really annoys me. As I presented it first in this post though, looking at Old Seth as the way it should be, we’re just left with a nitpicking detail that Old Joe should’ve left a body instead of vanishing.
Still, and in fact, especially if it’s such a minor thing, it bugs me that it wasn’t more airtight.
Attributing a ruleset to this film is way to generous.